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“WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?” Page 438. 
Frontispiece. —The Iron Woman 












THE 

IRON 

WOMAN 

BY 

MARGARET DELAND 


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
F. WALTER TAYLOR 


“ Tins was the iniquity . . . fulness cf bread, and 
abundance of idleness . . . ” —Ezekiel»»vI., 49 



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

























































% 



COPYRIGHT. 1910. 1911. SY HARPER a BROTHERS 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






PATIENT, RUTHLESS 


INSPIRING CRITIC 


LORIN DELAND 


AUGUST t^, ISIt 



THE IRON WOMAN 


CHAPTER I 

“Climb tip in this tree, and play house!*' Elizabeth 
Ferguson commanded. She herself had climbed to the 
lowest branch of an apple-tree in the Maitland orchard, 
and sat there, swinging her white-stockinged legs so 
recklessly that the three children whom she had sum¬ 
moned to her side, backed away for safety. “ If you 
don't,*’ she said, looking down at them, “I'm afraid, 
perhaps, maybe. I'll get mad.’* 

Her foreboding was tempered by a giggle and by the 
deepening dimple in her cheek, but all the same she 
sighed with a sort of impersonal regret at the prospect 
of any unpleasantness. “It would be too bad if I got 
mad, wouldn’t it?*' she said thoughtfully. The others 
looked at one another in consternation. They knew so 
well what it meant to have Elizabeth “mad," that Nan¬ 
nie Maitland, the oldest of the little group, said at once, 
helplessly, “Well.'’ 

Nannie was always helpless with Elizabeth, just as 
she was helpless with her half-brother, Blair, though she 
was ten and Elizabeth and Blair were only eight; but 
how could a little girl like Nannie be an3rthing but help¬ 
less before a brother whom she adored, and a wonderful 
being like Elizabeth?—Elizabeth! who always knew 
exactly what she wantoxi to do, and who instantly “got 
mad,” if you wouldn't say you'd do it, too; got mad. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and then repented, and hugged you and kissed you, and 
actually cried (or got mad again), if you refused to ac¬ 
cept as a sign of your forgiveness her new slate-pencil, 
decorated with strips of red - and - white paper just 
like a little barber’s pole! No wonder Nannie, timid 
and good-natured, was helpless before such a sweet, 
furious little creature! Blair had more backbone than 
his sister, but even he felt Elizabeth’s heel upon his 
neck. David Richie, a silent, candid, very stubborn 
small boy, was, after a momentary struggle, as meek as 
the rest of them. Now, when she commanded them all 
to climb, it was David who demurred, because, he said, 
he spoke first for Indians tomahawking you in the back 
parlor. 

“Very well!” said the despot; “play your old 
Indians! I’ll never speak to any of you again as long 
as I live!” 

“I’ve got on my new pants,” David objected. 

“Take ’em off!” said Elizabeth. And there is no 
knowing what might have happened if the decorous 
Nannie had not come to the rescue. 

“ That’s not proper to do out-of-doors; and Miss White 
says not to say ‘ pants.’ ” 

Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “Maybe it isn’t prop¬ 
er,” she admitted; “but David, honest, I took a hate 
to being tommy-hocked the last time we played it; so 
please, dear David! If you’ll play house in the tree. 
I’ll give you a piece of my taffy.” She took a little 
sticky package out of her pocket and licked her lips to 
indicate its contents;—David yielded, shinning up the 
trunk of the tree, indifferent to the trousers, which had 
been on his mind ever since he had put them on his legs. 

Blair followed him, but Nannie squatted on the ground 
content to merely look at the courageous three. 

“Come on up,” said Elizabeth. Nannie shook her 
little blond head. At which the others burst into a 
shrill chorus: “’Fraid-cat! ’fraid-cat! ’fraid-cat!” 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Nannie smiled placidly; it never occurred to her to 
deny such an obviously truthful title. “ Blair,” she said, 
continuing a conversation interrupted by Elizabeth’s 
determination to climb, “Blair, why do you say things 
that make Mamma mad ? What’s the sense ? If it makes 
her mad for you to say things are ugly, why do you?” 

“ ’Cause,” Blair said briefly. Even at eight Blair dis¬ 
liked both explanations and decisions, and his slave and 
half-sister rarely pressed for either. With the exception 
of his mother, whose absorption in business had never 
gb'-en her time to get acquainted with him, most of 
the people about Blair were his slaves. Elizabeth’s 
governess. Miss White—called by Elizabeth, for reasons 
of her own, “Cherry-pie” — had completely surren¬ 
dered to his brown eyes; the men in the Maitland 
Works toadied to him; David Richie blustered, per¬ 
haps, but always gave in to him; in his own home, 
Harris, who was a cross between a butler and a maid-of- 
all-work, adored him to the point of letting him make 
candy on the kitchen stove — probably the greatest 
expression of affection possible to the kitchen; in fact, 
little Elizabeth Ferguson was the only person in his 
world who did not knuckle down to this pleasant and 
lovable child. But then, Elizabeth never knuckled 
down to anybody! Certainly not to kind old Cherry-pie, 
whose timid upper lip quivered like a rabbit’s when she 
was obliged to repeat to her darling some new rule of 
Robert Ferguson’s for his niece’s upbringing* nor did 
she knuckle down to her uncle;—she even declared she 
was not at all afraid of him! This was almost unbeliev¬ 
able to the others, who scattered like robins if they heard 
his step. And she had greater courage than this; she 
had, in fact, audacity! for she said she was willing—this 
the others told each other in awed tones—she said she 
had “just as lieves” walk right up and speak to Mrs. 
Maitland herself, and ask her for twenty cents so she 
could treat the whole crowd to ice-cream! That is, she 

3 


THE IRON WOMAN 


would just as lieves, if she should happen to want to. 
Now, as she sat in the apple-tree swinging her legs and 
sharing her taffy, it occurred to her to mention, apropos 
of nothing, her opinion of Mrs. Maitland’s looks: 

“I like Blair’s mother best; but David’s mother is 
prettier than Blair’s mother.” 

“It isn’t polite to brag on mothers,” said David, sur¬ 
veying his new trousers complacently, “but I know what 
I think.” 

Blair, jouncing up and down on his branch, agreed 
with unoffended candor. “ ’Course she’s prettier. Any¬ 
body is. Mother’s ugly.” 

“ It isn’t right to say things like that out of the family,” 
Nannie observed. 

“This is the family. You’re going to marry David, 
and I’m going to marry Elizabeth. And I’m going to be 
awfully rich; and I’ll give all you children a lot of money. 
Jimmy Sullivan—he’s a friend of mine; I got acquainted 
with him yesterday, and he’s the biggest puddler in our 
Works. Jimmie said, ‘You’re the only son,’ he said, 
‘ you’ll get it all.’ ’Course I told him I’d give him some,” 
said Blair. 

At this moment Elizabeth was moved to catch David 
round the neck, and give him a loud kiss on his left ear. 
David sighed. “You may kiss me,” he said patiently; 
“but I’d rather you’d tell me when you want to. You 
knocked off my cap.” 

“ Say, David,” Nannie said, flinging his cap up to him, 
“ Blair can stand on his head and count five. You can’t. ” 

At this David’s usual admiration for Blair suffered an 
eclipse; he grew very red, then exploded: “ I—I—I’ve had 
mumps, and I have two warts, and Blair hasn’t. And I 
have a real dining-room at my house, and Blair hasn’t!” 

Nannie flew to the rescue: “You haven’t got a real 
mother. You are only an adopted.” 

“Well, what are you?” David said, angrily; “you’re 
nothing but a Step.” 


4 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ I haven’t got any kind of a mother,” Elizabeth 
said, with complacent melancholy. 

“Stop fighting,” Blair commanded amiably; “David 
is right; we have a pigsty of a dining-room at our house.” 
He paused to bend over and touch with an ecstatic 
finger a flake of lichen covering with its serpent green the 
damp, black bark in the crotch of the old tree. “ Isn’t 
that pretty?” he said. 

“You ought not to say things about our house,” 
Nannie reproved him. As Blair used to say when he 
grew up, “Nannie was bom proper.” 

“Why not?” said Blair. “They know everything is 
ugly at our house. They’ve got real dining-rooms at 
their houses; they don’t have old desks round, the way 
we do.” 

It was in the late sixties that these children played in 
the apple-tree and arranged their conjugal future; at 
that time the Maitland house was indeed, as poor little 
Blair said, “ugly.” Twenty years before, its gardens and 
meadows had stretched over to the river; but the estate 
had long ago come down in size and gone up in dollars. 
Now, there was scarcely an acre of sooty green left, and 
it was pressed upon by the yards of the Maitland Works, 
and almost islanded by railroad tracks. Grading had 
left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat 
above the level of a street noisy with incessant teaming, 
and generally fetlock-deep in black mud. The house 
stood a little back from the badly paved sidewalk; its 
meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence—a row 
of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with 
innumerable gray cocoons. (Blair and David made con¬ 
stant and furtive attempts to lift these spears, socketed 
in crumbling lead in the granite base, for of course there 
could be nothing better for fighting Indians than a real 
iron spear.) The orchard behind the house had been cut 
in two by a spur track, which brought jolting gondola 
cars piled with red ore down to the furnace. The half- 

5 


THE IRON WOMAN 


dozen apple-trees that were left stretched gaunt arms 
over sour, grassless earth; they put out faint flakes of 
blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show of 
greenness, which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened 
out of all semblance of foliage. But all the same the 
children found it a delightful place to play, although 
Blair sometimes said sullenly that it was “ugly.” Blair 
hated ugly things, and, poor child! he was assailed by 
ugliness on every side. The queer, disorderly dining¬ 
room, in which for reasons of her own Mrs. Maitland 
transacted so much of her business that it had become 
for all practical purposes an office of her Works, was 
perhaps the “ugliest” thing in the world to the little 
boy. 

“Why don’t we have a real dining-room?” he said 
once; “why do we have to eat in a office?” 

“We’ll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient,” his 
mother told him, looking at him over her newspaper, 
which was propped against a silver coffee-urn that had 
found a clear space on a breakfast table cluttered with 
papers and ledgers. 

“They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at 
David’s house,” the little boy complained; “I don’t see 
why we can’t.” 

“ I don’t eat flowers,” Mrs. Maitland said grimly. 

“I don’t eat papers,” Blair said, under his breath; 
and his mother looked at him helplessly. How is one to 
reply to a child of eight who makes remarks of this kind ? 
Mrs. Maitland did not know; it was one of the many 
things she did not know in relation to her son; for at 
that time she loved him with her mind rather than her 
body, so she had none of those soft intuitions and per¬ 
suasions of the flesh which instruct most mothers. In 
her perplexity she expressed tne sarcastic anger one 
might vent upon an equal under the same circumstances: 

“ You’d eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, 
if it wasn’t for the ‘ papers,’ as you call ’em, in this house I” 

6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


But it was no wonder that Blair called it ugly—the 
house, the orchard, the Works—even his mother, in her 
rusty black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the big, 
dingy dining-room, driving her body and soul, and the 
bodies and souls of her workmen—all for the sake of the 
little, shrinking boy, who wanted a bunch of flowers on 
the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And poor little 
proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to 
make peace. Nannie’s perplexities had begun very far 
back. Of course she was too young when her father 
married his second wife to puzzle over that; but if she 
did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague young 
widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and was 
as unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an 
iron-works was a matter of inheritance—why such a man 
wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair was beyond anybody’s 
wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that he did not 
want to. 

There were rumors that after the death of Nannie’s 
mother, Herbert Maitland had been inclined to look for 
consolation to a certain Miss Molly Wharton (she that 
afterward married another widower, Henry Knight); 
and everybody thought Miss Molly was willing to smile 
upon him. Be that as it may, he suddenly found himself 
the husband of his late partner’s daughter, a woman eight 
years older than he, and at least four inches taller; a 
silent, plain woman, of devastating common sense, who 
contradicted all those femininities and soft lovelinesses 
so characteristic, not only of his first wife but of pretty 
Molly Wharton also. 

John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an 
uneducated, extremely intelligent man, had risen from 
puddling to partnership in the Maitland Works. There 
had been no social relations between Mr. Maitland, Sr., 
and this new member of the firm, but the older man had 
a very intimate respect, and even admiration for John 
Blair. When he came to die he confided his son’s inter- 

7 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ests to his partner with absolute confidence that they 
would be safe. “Herbert has no gumption, John,” he 
said; “he wants to be an ‘artist.’ You’ve got to look 
after him.” “I will, Mr. Maitland, I will,” said John 
Blair, snuffling and blowing his nose on a big red pocket- 
handkerchief. He did look after him. He put Herbert’s 
affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to his 
daughter, who in business matters was, curiously enough, 
his right-hand man, that “Maitland’s boy” was always, 
as he expressed it, “to have the inside track.” 

“I ain’t bothering about you, Sally; I’ll leave you 
enough. And if I didn’t, you could scratch gravel for 
yourself. But Maitland’s boy ain’t our kind. He must 
be taken care of.” 

When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness 
to his wishes made his Sally “take care” of Herbert 
Maitland by marrying him. “His child certainly does 
need a mother,” she thought;—“ an intelligent mother, 
not a goose.” By and by she told Herbert of his 
child’s need; or at any rate helped him to infer it. 
And somehow, before he knew it, he married her. By 
inheritance they owned the Works between them; 
so really their marriage was, as the bride expressed 
it, “a very sensible arrangement”; and any sensible 
arrangement appealed to John Blair’s daughter. 
But after a breathless six months of partnership—in 
business if in nothing else—Herbert Maitland, leav¬ 
ing behind him his little two-year-old Nannie, and 
an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he 
was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously 
as consumption could take him. Indeed, his wife had- 
so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that ■ 
there was nothing for him to do but die—so that there 
might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved 
him; nobody who saw her in those first silent, agonized 
months could doubt that she loved him. Her pain 
expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical pros- 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tration, but in work. Work, which had been an interest, 
became a refuge. Under like circumstances some people 
take to religion and some to drink; as Mrs. Maitland’s 
religion had never been more than church-going and 
contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no 
help under the strain of grief; and as her temperament 
did not dictate the other means of consolation, she turned 
to work. She worked herself numb; very likely she had 
hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not 
feel anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging 
hands, or his milky lips at her breast. She did her duty 
by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of 
him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to 
nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared 
the naive conviction of her day that church-going and 
religion were synonymous, she began, when he was four 
years old, to take him to church. In her shiny, shabby 
black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since 
it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited 
trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two chil¬ 
dren, and felt that she was doing her duty to both of 
them. A sense of duty without maternal instinct is not, 
perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct without 
a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years 
of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to 
have nothing but duty offer to her child. Nannie’s 
puzzles began then. “ Why don’t Mamma hug my baby 
brother ?” she used to ask the nurse, who had no explana¬ 
tion to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug 
Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks 
sealed her to his service while he was still in petticoats. 

Blair was three years old before, under the long atro¬ 
phy of grief, Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to 
stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy’s shrinking 
from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by 
another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor 
of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his 

9 


THE IRON WOMAN 


first expressiDns of opinion had been contained in the 
single word “uggy,” accompanied by a finger pointed at 
his mother. Whenever she sneezed—^and she was one of 
those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze— 
Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at 
the unexpected sound, then burst into furious tears. 
When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy 
black alpaca breast, he would say violently, “No, no! 
No, no!” at which she would push him roughly from her 
knee, and fall into hurt silence. Once, when he was five 
years old, she came in to dinner hot from a morning in 
the Works, her moist forehead grimy with dust, and bent 
over to kiss him; at which the little boy wrinkled up his 
nose and turned his face aside. 

“What’s the matter?” his mother said; and called 
sharply to the nurse: “I won’t have any highfalutin’ 
business in this boy! Get it out of him.” Then reso¬ 
lutely she took Blair’s little chin in her hand—a big, 
beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened 
nails—and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek 
roughly against his. “Get over your airs!” she said, 
and sat down and ate her dinner without another w'ord 
to Blair or any one else. But the next day, as if to pur¬ 
chase the kiss he would not give, she told him he was to 
have an “allowance.” The word had no meaning to the 
little fellow, until she showed him two bright new dollars 
and said he could buy candy with them; then his brown 
eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at 
that moment that money began to mean something to 
him. He bought the candy, which he divided with 
Nannie, and he bought also a present for his mother,—a 
bottle of cologne, with a tiny calendar tied around its 
neck by a red ribbon. “The ribbon is pretty,” he ex¬ 
plained shyly. She was so pleased that she instantly 
gave him another dollar, and then put the long green 
bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his 
photographs. 

lO 


THE IRON WOMAN 


In the days when the four children played in the 
orchard, and had lessons with Miss White, in the 
school - room in Mr. Ferguson’s garret, and were 
“treated” by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream—- 
even in those days Mercer was showing signs of what it 
was ultimately to become: the apotheosis of materialism 
and vulgarity. Iron was entering into its soul. It 
thought extremely well of itself; when a new mill was 
built, or a new furnace blown in, it thought still better of 
itself. It prided itself upon its growth; in fact, its com¬ 
placency, its ugliness and its size kept pace with one an¬ 
other. 

“ Look at our output,” Sarah Maitland used to brag to 
her general manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; “and look at 
our churches! We have more churches for our size than 
any town west of the Alleghanies.” 

“We need more jails than any town, east or west,” 
Mr. Ferguson retorted, grimly. 

Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was 
full of pride. “You just wait! We’ll be the most im¬ 
portant city in this country yet, because we will hold 
the commerce of the world right here in our mills!” She 
put out her great open palm, and slowly closed the 
strong, beautiful fingers into a gripping fist. “The 
commerce of the world, right hereT’ she said, thrusting 
the clenched hand, that quivered a little, almost into his 
face. 

Robert Ferguson snorted. He was a melancholy man, 
with thin, bitterly sensitive lips, and kind eyes that were 
curiously magnified by gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he 
had a way of knocking off with disconcerting sudden¬ 
ness. He did not, he declared, trust anybody. “What’s 
the use?” he said; “you only get your face slapped!” 
For his part, he believed the Eleventh Commandment 
was, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, because 
he’ll get it.” 

“Read your Bible!” Mrs. Maitland retorted; “then 

II 


THE IRON WOMAN 


you’ll know enough to call it a Beatitude, not a Com¬ 
mandment.’" 

Mr. Ferguson snorted again. “ Bible ? It’s all I can do 
to get time to read my paper. I’m worked to death/’ 
he reproached her. But in spite of being worked to 
death he always found time on summer evenings to 
weed the garden in his back yard, or on winter morn¬ 
ings to feed a flock of Mercer’s sooty pigeons; and he 
had been known to walk all over town to find a par¬ 
ticular remedy for a sick child of one of his molders. 
To be sure he alleged, when Mrs. Maitland accused him 
of kindness, that, as far as the child was concerned, he 
was a fool for his pains, because human critters (“I’m 
one of ’em myself,”) were a bad lot and it would be a good 
thing if they all died young! 

“Oh, you have a fine bark, friend Ferguson,” she said, 
“but when it comes to a bite, I guess most folks get a 
kiss from you.” 

“Kiss?” said Robert Ferguson, horrified; “not much!” 

They were very good friends, these two, each growling 
at, disapproving of, and completely trusting the other. 
Mrs. Maitland’s chief disapproval of her superintendent— 
for her reproaches about his bark were really expressions 
of admiration—her serious disapproval was based on the 
fact that, when the season permitted, he broke the 
Sabbath by grubbing in his garden, instead of going 
to church. A grape-arbor ran the length of this garden, 
and in August the Isabellas, filmed with soot, had a 
flavor, Robert Ferguson thought, finer than could be 
found in any of the vineyards lying in the hot sunshine 
on the banks of the river, far out of reach of Mercer’s 
smoke. There was a flagstone path around the arbor, 
and then borders of perennials against brick walls thick 
with ivy or hidden by trellised peach-trees. All summer 
long bees came to murmur among the flowers, and every 
breeze that blew over them carried some sweetness to the 
hot and tired streets outside. It was a spot of perfume 

12 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and peace, and it was no wonder that the hard-working, 
sad-eyed man liked to spend his Sundays in it. But 
“remembering the Sabbath” was his employer’s strong 
point. Mr&. Maitland kept the Fourth Commandment 
with passion. Her Sundays, dividing each six days of 
extraordinary activity, were arid stretches of the un¬ 
speakable dullness of idleness. When Blair grew up he 
used to look back at those Sundays and shudder. There 
was church and Sunday-school in the morning, then a 
cold dinner, for cold roast beef was Mrs. Maitland’s 
symbol of Sabbatical holiness. Then an endless, vacant 
afternoon, spent always indoors. Certain small, pious 
books were permitted the two children— Little Henry and 
His Bearer^ The Ministering Children, and like moral 
food; but no games, no walks, no playing in the orchard. 
Silence and weary idleness and Little Henry’s holy 
arrogances. Though the day must have been as dreary 
to Mrs. Maitland as it was to her son and daughter, she 
never winced. She sat in the parlor, dressed in black 
silk, and read The Presbyterian and the Bible. She 
never allowed herself to look at her desk in the dining¬ 
room, or even at her knitting, which on week-days when 
she had no work to do was a great resource; she looked 
at the clock a good deal, and sometimes she sighed, then 
applied herself to The Presbyterian. She went to bed at 
half-past seven as against eleven or twelve on other nights, 
first reading, with extraordinary rapidity, her “Chapter.” 
Mrs. Maitland had a “system” by which she was able to 
read the Bible through once a year. She frequently 
recommended it to her superintendent; to her way of 
thinking such reading was accounted to her as righteous¬ 
ness. 

Refreshed by a somnolent Sunday, she would rush 
furiously into business on Monday morning, and Mr. 
Robert Ferguson, who never went to church, followed 
in her wake, doing her bidding with grim and admiring 
thoroughness. If not “ worked to death,” he was, at any 

13 


THE IRON WOMAN 


rate, absorbed in her affairs. Even when he went home 
at night, and, on summer evenings, fell to grubbing in his 
narrow back yard, where his niece “helped” him by 
pushing a little wheelbarrow over the mossy flagstones,— 
even then he did not dismiss Mrs. Maitland’s business 
from his mind. He was scrupulous to say, as he picked 
up the weeds scattered from the wheelbarrow, “Have 
you been a good little girl to-day, Elizabeth ?” but all the 
while, in his own thoughts he was going over matters at 
the Works. On Sundays he managed to get far enough 
away from business to interrogate Miss White about his 
niece: 

“ I hope Elizabeth is behaving herself. Miss White ?” 

“Oh yes; she is a dear, good child.” 

“Well, you never can tell about children,—or anybody 
else. Keep a sharp eye on her. Miss White. And be 
careful, please, about vanity. I thought I saw her look¬ 
ing in the mirror in the hall this morning. Please dis¬ 
courage any signs of vanity.” 

“She hasn’t a particle of vanity!” Miss White said 
warmly. 

But in spite of such assurances, Mr. Ferguson was 
always falling into bleakly apprehensive thoughts of his 
little girl, obstinately denying his pride in her, and allow¬ 
ing himself only the meager hope that she would “turn 
out fairly decently.” Vanity was his especial concern, 
and he was more than once afraid he had discovered it: 
Elizabeth was not allowed to go to dancing-school— 
dancing and vanity were somehow related in her uncle’s 
mind; so the vital, vivid little creature expressed the 
rhythm that was in her by dancing without instruction, 
keeping time with loud, elemental cadences of her own 
composing, not always melodious, but always in time. 
Sometimes she danced thus in the school-room; some¬ 
times in Mrs. Todd’s “ice-cream parlor” at the farther 
end of Mercer’s old wooden bridge; once—and this was 
one of the occasions when Mr. Ferguson thought he had 

14 


THE IRON WOMAN 


detected the vice he dreaded—once she danced in his 
very own library! Up and down she went, back and 
forth, before a long mirror that stood between the win¬ 
dows. She had put a daffodowmdilly behind each ear, 
and twisted a dandelion chain around her neck. She 
looked, as she came and went, smiling and dimpling at 
herself in the shadowy depths of the mirror, like a flower 
—a flower in the wind!—bending and turning and sway¬ 
ing, and singing as she danced: “ Oh, isn’t it joyful— 
joyful—joyful!” 

It was then that her uncle came upon her; for just a 
moment he stood still in involuntary delight, then remem¬ 
bered his theories; there was certainly vanity in her prim¬ 
itive adornment! He knocked his glasses off with a fierce 
gesture, and did his duty by barking at her,—as Mrs. 
Maitland would have expressed it. He told her in an 
angry voice that she must go to bed for the rest of the 
day! at least, if she ever did it again, she must go to bed 
for the rest of the day. 

Another time he felt even surer of the feminine failing : 
Elizabeth said, in his presence, that she wished she had 
some rings like those of a certain Mrs. Richie, who had 
lately come to live next door; at which Mr. Ferguson 
barked at Miss White, barked so harshly that Elizabeth 
flew at him like a little enraged cat. “Stop scolding 
Cherry-pie! You hurt her feelings; you are a wicked 
man!” she screamed, and beating him with her right 
hand, she fastened her small, sharp teeth into her left 
arm just above the wrist—then screamed again with self- 
inflicted pain. But when Miss White, dism^ayed at such 
a loss of self-control, apologized for her, Mr. Ferguson 
shrugged his shoulders. 

“I don’t mind temper,” he said; “I used to have a 
temper myself; but I will not have her vain! Better put 
some plaster on her arm. Elizabeth, you must not call 
Miss White by that ridiculous name.” 

The remark about Mrs. Richie’s rings really disturbed 


THE IRON WOMAN 


him; it made him deplore to himself the advent as a neighs 
bor of a foolish woman. “She’ll put ideas into Eliza¬ 
beth’s head," he told himself. In regard to the rings, he 
had not needed Elizabeth to instruct him. He had 
noticed them himself, and they had convinced him that 
this Mrs. Richie, who at first sight seemed a shy, sad 
woman with no nonsense about her, was really no excep¬ 
tion to her sex. “Vain and lazy, like the rest of them," 
he said cynically. Having passed the age when he 
cared to sport with Amaryllis, he did not, he said, like 
women. When he was quite a young man, he had 
added, “except Mrs. Maitland." Which remark, being 
repeated to Molly Wharton, had moved that young lady 
to retort that the reason that Sarah Maitland was the 
only woman he liked, was that Sarah Maitland was not a 
woman! “The only feminine thing about her is her 
petticoats,” said Miss Wharton, daintily. For which 
mot, Robert Ferguson never forgave her. He certainly 
did not expect to like this new-comer in Mercer, this Mrs. 
Richie, but he had gone to see her. He had been obliged 
to, because she wished to rent a house he owned next 
door to the one in which he lived. So, being her landlord, 
he had to see her, if for nothing else, to discourage re¬ 
quests for inside repairs. He saw her, and promised to 
put up a little glass house at the end of the back parlor 
for a plant-room. “If she’d asked me for a ‘conserva¬ 
tory,’" he said to himself, “I wouldn’t have considered 
it for a moment; but just a few sashes—I suppose I 
might as well give in on that? Besides, if she likes 
flowers, there must be something to her." All the 
same, he was conscious of having given in, and to a 
woman who wore rings; so he was quite gruff with Mrs. 
Richie’s little boy^ whom he found listening to an ha¬ 
rangue from Elizabeth. The two children had scraped 
acquaintance through the iron fence that separated the 
piazzas of the two houses. “I," Elizabeth had an¬ 
nounced, “have a mosquito-bite on my leg; I’ll show it 

i6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to you/' she said, generously; and when the bite on her 
little thigh was displayed, she tried to think of other 
personal matters. “ My mother’s dead. And my father’s 
dead.” 

“ So’s mine,” David matched her, proudly. “I’m an 
adopted child.” 

“I have a pair of red shoes with white buttons,” she 
said. David, unable to think of any possession of his 
own to cap either bite or boots, was smitten into gloomy 
silence. 

In spite of the landlord’s disapproval of his tenant’s 
rings, the acquaintance of the two families grew. Mr. 
Ferguson had to see Mrs. Richie again about those 
“sashes,” or what not. His calls were always on busi¬ 
ness— but though he talked of greenhouses, and she 
talked of knocking out an extra window in the nursery 
so that her little boy could have more sunshine, they 
slipped after a while into personalities: Mrs. Richie had 
no immediate family; her—her husband had died nearly 
three years before. Since then she had been living in 
St. Louis. She had come now to Mercer because she 
wanted to be nearer to a friend, an old clergyman, who 
lived in a place called Old Chester. 

“I think it’s about twenty miles up the river,” she 
said. “That’s where I found David. I—I had lost a 
little boy, and David had lost his mother, so we belonged 
together. It doesn’t make any difference to us, that he 
isn’t my own, does it, David?” 

“Yes’m,” said David. 

“ David! Why won’t you ever say what as expected of 
you ? We don’t know anybody in Mercer,” she went on, 
with a shy, melancholy smile, “except Elizabeth.” And 
at her kind look the little girl, who had tagged along 
behind her uncle, snuggled up to the maternal presence, 
and rubbed her cheek against the white hand which had 
the pretty rings on it. “ I am so glad to have somebody 
for David to play with,” Mrs. Richie said, looking down 

17 


THE IRON WOMAN 


at the little nestling thing, who at that moment stopped 
nestling, and dropping down on toes and finger-tips, 
loped up —r on very long hind - legs, to the confusion 
of her elders, who endeavored not to see her peculiar 
attitude — and, putting a paw into David’s pocket, 
abstracted a marble. There was an instant explo¬ 
sion, in which David, after securing his property 
through violent exertions, sought, as a matter of pure 
justice, to pull the bear’s hair. But when Mrs. Richie 
interfered, separating the combatants with horrified 
apologies for her young man’s conduct, Elizabeth’s 
squeals stopped abruptly. She stood panting, her eyes 
still watering with David’s tug at her hair; the dimple in 
her right cheek began to lengthen into a hard line. 

“You are very naughty, David,’’ said Mrs. Richie, 
sternly; “you must beg Elizabeth’s pardon at once!” 
At which Elizabeth burst out: 

“Stop! Don’t scold him. It was my fault. I did it 
—^taking his marble. I’ll—I’ll bite my arm if you scold 
David!” 

“Elizabeth!” protested her uncle; “I’m ashamed of 
you!” 

But Elizabeth was indifferent to his shame; she was 
hugging David frantically. “ I hate, I hate, I hate your 
mother—if she does have rings!” Her face was so con¬ 
vulsed with rage that Mrs. Richie actually recoiled before 
it; Elizabeth, still clamoring, saw that involuntary start 
of horror. Instantly she was calm; but she shrank away 
almost out of the room. It seemed as if at that moment 
some veil, cold and impenetrable, fell between the gentle 
woman and the fierce, pathetic child—a veil that was not 
to be lifted until, in some mysterious way, life should 
make them change places. 

The two elders looked at each other, Robert Ferguson 
with meager amusement; Mrs. Richie still grave at the 
remembrance of that furious little face. “What did she 
mean about ‘ biting her arm ’ ?” she asked, after Elizabeth 

i8 


THE IRON WOMAN 


had been sent home, the bewildered David being told to 
accompany her to the door. 

“I believe she bites herself when she gets angry,” 
Elizabeth’s uncle said; “Miss White said she had quite 
a sore place on her arm last winter, because she bit it so 
often. It’s of no consequence,” he added, knocking his 
glasses off fiercely. Again Mrs. Richie looked shocked. 
“She is my brother’s child,” he said, briefly; “he died 
some years ago. He left her to me.” And Mrs. Richie 
knew instinctively that the bequest had not been wel¬ 
come. “Miss White looks after her,” he said, putting his 
glasses on again, carefully, with both hands; “she calls 
her her ‘Lamb,’ though a more unlamblike person than 
Elizabeth I never met. She has a little school for her and 
the two Maitland youngsters in the top of my house. Miss 
White is otherwise known as Cherry-pie. Elizabeth, I 
am informed, loves cherry-pie; also, she loves Miss White: 
ergo!” he ended, with his snort of a laugh. Then he had 
a sudden thought: “Why don’t you let David come to 
Miss White for lessons? I’ve no doubt she could look 
after another pupil.” 

“ I’d be delighted to,” Mrs. Richie said, gratefully. So, 
through the good offices of Mr. Ferguson, the arrange¬ 
ment was made. Mr. Ferguson did not approve of Mrs. 
Richie’s rings, but he had no objection to helping her 
about David. 

And that was how it happened that these four little 
lives were thrown together—four threads that were to be 
woven into the great fabric of Life. 


CHAPTER II 


On the other side of the street, opposite the Maitland 
house, was a huddle of wooden tenements. Some of 
them were built on piles, and seemed to stand on stilts, 
holding their draggled skirts out of the mud of their 
untidy yards: some sagged on rotting sills, leaning 
shoulder to shoulder as if to prop one another up. From 
each front door a shaky flight of steps ran down to the 
unpaved sidewalk, where pigs and children and hens, and 
the daily tramp of feet to and from the Maitland Works, 
had beaten the earth into a hard, black surface—or a 
soft, black surface, when it rained. These little huddling 
houses called themselves Maitland’s Shantytown, and 
they looked up at the Big House, standing in melancholy 
isolation behind its fence of iron spears, with the pride 
that is common to us all when we And ourselves in the 
company of our betters. Back of the little houses was a 
strip of waste land, used for a dump; and beyond it, 
bristling against the sky, the long line of Mercer’s stacks 
and chimneys. 

In spite of such surroundings, the Big House, even as 
late as the early seventies, was impressive. It was 
square, with four great chimneys, and long windows 
that ran from floor to ceiling. Its stately entrance and 
its two curving flights of steps were of white marble, 
and so were the lintels of the windows; but the stone 
was so stained and darkened with smoky years of 
rains and river fogs, that its only beauty lay in the noble 
lines that grime and time had not been able to destroy. 
A gnarled and twisted old wistaria roped the doorway, 

20 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and, crawling almost to the roof, looped along the eaves, 
in May it broke into a froth of exquisite purple and faint 
green, and for a week the garland of blossoms, murmur¬ 
ous with bees, lay clean and lovely against the narrow, 
old bricks which had once been painted yellow. Outside, 
the house had a distinction which no superficial dilapi¬ 
dation could mar; but inside distinction was almost 
lost in the commonplace, if not in actual ugliness. The 
double parlors on the right of the wide hall had been 
furnished in the complete vulgarity of the sixties; on the 
left was the library, which had long ago been taken by 
Mrs. Maitland as a bedroom, for the practical reason that 
it opened into the dining-room, so her desk was easily 
accessible at any time of night, should her passion for toil 
seize her after working-hours were over. The walls of 
this room were still covered with books, that no one 
ever read. Mrs. Maitland had no time to waste on 
reading; “I live,"' she used to say; “I don’t read 
about living!” Except the imprisoned books, the 
only interesting things in the room were some cartes- 
de-visite of Blair, which stood in a dusty row on the 
bureau, one of them propped against her son’s first pres¬ 
ent to her—the unopened bottle of Johann Maria Fa¬ 
rina. When Blair was a man, that bottle still stood there, 
the kid cap over the cork split and yellow, the ribbons of 
the little calendar hanging from its green neck, faded to 
streaky white. 

The office dining-room, about which Blair had begun 
to be impertinent when he was eight years old, was of 
noble proportions and in its day must have had great 
dignity; but in Blair’s childhood its day was over. 
Above the dingy white wainscoting the landscape paper 
his grandfather had brought from France in the thirties 
had faded into a blur of blues and buffs. The floor was 
uncarpeted save for a Persian rug, whose colors had long 
since dulled to an even grime. At one end of the 
room was Mrs. Maitland’s desk; at the other, filing- 

21 


THE IRON WOMAN 


cases, and two smaller desks where clerks worked at 
ledgers or drafting. The /our French windows were 
uncurtained, and the inside shutters folded back, so that 
the silent clerks might have che oenefit of every ray of 
daylight filtering wanly through Mercer’s murky air. 
A long table stood in the middle of the room; generally 
it was covered with blue-prints, or the usual impedimenta 
of an office. But it was not an office table; it was of 
mahogany, scratched and dim to be sure, but matching 
the ancient claw-footed sideboard whose top was littered 
with letter files, silver teapots and sugar-bowls, and 
stacks of newspapers. Three times a day one end of 
this table was cleared, and the early breakfast, or the 
noon dinner, or the rather heavy supper eaten rapidly 
and for the most part in silence. Mrs. Maitland was 
silent because she was absorbed in thought; Nannie and 
Blair were silent because they were afraid to talk. But 
the two children gave a touch of humanness to the 
ruthless room, which, indeed, poor little Blair had some 
excuse for calling a “pigsty.” 

“When I’m big,” Blair announced one afternoon after 
school, “I’ll have a bunch of flowers on the table, like 
your mother does; you see if I don’t! I like your mother, 
David.” 

“J don’t; very much,” Elizabeth volunteered. “She 
looks out of her eyes at me when I get mad.” 

“I don’t like to live at my house,” Blair said, sigh¬ 
ing. 

“Why don’t you run away?” demanded Elizabeth; 
“I’m going to some day when I get time.” 

“Where would you run to?” David said, practically. 
David was always disconcertingly practical. 

But Elizabeth would not be pinned down to details. 
“ I will decide that when I get started.” 

“ I believe,” Blair meditated, “ I will run away.” 

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Elizabeth said, and paused 
to pick up her right ankle and hop an ecstatic yard or two 

n 


THE IRON WOMAN 


on one foot; “ I tell you what let’s do: let’s all run away, 
and get married /’ ’ 

The other three stared at her dumfounded. Elizabeth, 
whirling about on her toes, dropped down on all-fours to 
turn a somersault of joy; when she was on her feet she 
said, “Oh, lefs get married!’’ But it took Blair, who 
always found it difficult to make up his mind, a few 
moments to accept the project. 

They had planned to devote that afternoon to playing 
bury-you-alive under the yellow sofa in Mrs. ^^chie’s 
parlor, but this idea of Elizabeth’s made it necessary to 
hide in the “cave”—a shadowy spot behind the palm- 
tub in the greenhouse — for reflection. Once settled 
there jostling one another like young pigeons, it was 
David who, as usual, made the practical objections: 

“We haven’t any money.’’ 

“ I suppose we could get all the money we want out of 
my mother’s cash-box,’’ Blair admitted, wavering. 

“That’s stealing,’’ Elizabeth said. 

“You can’t steal from your mother,” Nannie defended 
her brother. 

“I’ll marry you, Elizabeth,” Blair said, with sudden 
enthusiastic decision. 

But David demurred: “ I think Fd like Elizabeth. I’m 
not sure I want to marry Nannie.” 

“You said Nannie’s hair was the longest, only yester¬ 
day!” Blair said, angrily. 

“ But I like Elizabeth’s color of hair. Nannie, do you 
think I’d like you to marry best, or Elizabeth ?” 

“ I don’t believe the color of hair makes any difference 
in being married,” Nannie said, kindly. “And anyway, 
you’ll have to marry me, David, ’cause Blair can’t. He’s 
my brother.” 

“He’s only your half-brother,” David pointed out. 

“You can have Nannie,” said Blair, “or you can stay 
out of the play.” 

“Well, I’ll marry Nannie,” David said, sadly; and 

23 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Blair proceeded to elaborate the scheme. It was very 
simple: the money in Mrs. Maitland’s cash-box would 
pay their fare to—“Oh, anywhere,” Blair said, then 
hesitated: “The only thing is, how’ll we get it ?” 

“ I’ll get it for you,” Nannie said, shuddering. 

“Wouldn’t you be scared?” Blair asked doubtfully. 
Everybody knew poor Nannie was a ’fraid-cat. 

“Little people,” somebody called from the parlor, 
“what are you chattering about?” 

The children looked at one another in a panic, but Blair 
called back courageously, “ Oh, nothing. ” 

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Richie, smiling at Mr. Robert 
Ferguson, who had dropped in to find Elizabeth—“per¬ 
haps you didn’t know that my conservatory was a 
Pirates’ Cave?” 

There was a sort of hesitant intimacy now between 
these two people, but it had never got so far as friend¬ 
ship. Mrs. Richie’s retreating shyness was courteous, 
but never cordial; Robert Ferguson’s somber egotism 
was kind, but never generous. Yet, owing no doubt to 
their two children, and to the fact that Mr. Ferguson was 
continually bringing things over from his garden borders, 
to transplant into hers—it improves the property, he 
told her briefly—owing to the children and the flowers, 
the landlord and the tenant saw each other rather fre¬ 
quently. On this especial afternoon, though Mr. Fergu¬ 
son had found Elizabeth, he still lingered, perhaps to tell 
the story of some extraordinary thing Mrs. Maitland had 
done that day at the Works. “ She’s been the only man 
in the family since old John died,” he ended; “and, 
judging from Blair, I guess she’ll continue to be.” 

“She is wonderful!” Mrs. Richie agreed; “but she’s 
lovable, too, which is more important.” 

“I should as soon say a locomotive was lovable,” he 
said; “not that that’s 4feainst her. Quite the contrary.” 

The pretty woman on the yellow damask sofa by the 
fireside flushed with offense. The fact was, this dry, 

24 


THE IRON WOMAN 


dogmatic man, old at thirty-six, lean, and in a time 
of beards clean-shaven, with gray hair that stood fiercely 
up from a deeply furrowed brow, and kind, unhappy 
eyes blinking behind the magnifying lenses of his gold- 
rimmed glasses, this really friendly neighbor, was always 
offending her—though he was rather nice about inside 
repairs. “Why do I endure him?” Mrs. Richie said to 
herself sometimes. Perhaps it was because, in spite of 
his manners, and his sneer that the world was a mighty 
mean place to live in, and his joyless way of doing his 
duty to his little niece, he certainly did see how good and 
sweet her David was. She reminded herself of this to 
check her offense at his snub about Mrs. Maitland; and 
all the while the good, sweet David was plotting behind 
the green tub of the palm-tree in the conservatory. But 
when Mr. Ferguson called to Elizabeth to come home 
with him, and then bent over and fussed about the but¬ 
tons on her jacket, and said, anxiously, “Are you warm 
enough. Pussy?” Mrs. Richie said to herself: “He is 
good! It’s only his manners that are bad.” 

Robert Ferguson went out into the brown November 
dusk with his little girl clinging to his hand, for so he 
understood his duty to^his niece; and on their own door¬ 
step Elizabeth asked a question: 

“Uncle, if you get married, do you have to stay mar¬ 
ried?” 

“He looked down at her with a start. ''WhatV he 
said. 

“ If you don’t like being married, do you have to stay ?” 

“Don’t ask foolish questions!” he said; “of course you 
have to.” 

Elizabeth sighed. As for her uncle, he was disturbed 
to the point of irritation. He dropped her hand with a 
gesture almost of disgust, and the lines in his forehead 
deepened into painful folds. After supper he called 
Elizabeth’s governess into the library, and shut the door. 

“ Miss White,” he said, knocking his glasses off, “ Eliza- 

25 


THE IRON WOMAN 


beth is getting to be a big girl; will you kindly make a 
point of teaching her—things ?” 

“ I will do so immejetly, sir,” said Miss White, “What 
things?” 

“Why,” said Robert Ferguson, helplessly, “why—■ 
general morals.” He put his glasses on carefully, with 
both hands. “Elizabeth asked me a very improper 
question; she asked me about divorce, and—” 

“ Divorce!'' exclaimed Miss White, astounded; “ I have 
been at my post for eight years, sir, and I am positive that 
that word has never been used in Elizabeth’s presence!” 

He did not explain. “Teach her,” he said, harshly, 
“that a woman has got to behave herself.” 

Blair having once decided upon it, clung to his pur¬ 
pose of running away, with a persistency which was 
his mother’s large determination in little; but the 
double elopement was delayed for two days because 
of the difficulty of securing the necessary funds. The 
dining-room, where Mrs. Maitland “kept all her money,” 
was rarely entirely deserted. In those brief intervals 
when the two clerks were not on hand, Harris seemed 
to be possessed of a clean devil, and spent an unusual 
amount of time “redding up”; or when Harris was 
in the kitchen, and Blair, dragging the reluctant Nannie, 
had peered into the room, he had been confronted 
by his mother. She never saw him—sometimes she 
was writing; sometimes talking to a foreman; some¬ 
times knitting, for when Sarah Maitland had nothing 
else to do, she made baby socks for the missionary 
barrel; once when Blair came to the door, she was walk¬ 
ing up and down knitting rapidly, thinking out some 
project; her ball of zephyr had fallen on the floor, and 
dragging along behind her, unwinding and unwinding, 
had involved her hurrying tramp in a grimy, pink tangle. 

Each time Blair had looked into the room it was 
policed by this absorbed presence. “We’ll never get mar- 

26 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ried!” he said in despair. The delay had a disastrous 
effect upon romance, for David, with the melancholy 
candor of a rea^soning temperament, was continually say¬ 
ing that he doubted the desirability of Nannie as a wife; 
and Elizabeth was just as hesitant about Blair. 

“Suppose I took a hate to you for a husband? Uncle 
Robert says if you don’t like being married, you can’t 
stop.” 

“You won’t want to stop. Married people don’t 
have to go to school!” 

Elizabeth sighed. “ But I don’t know but what may¬ 
be I’d like David for a husband?” 

“ He doesn’t have but ten cents a week allowance, and 
I have a dollar,” Blair reminded her. 

“Well, I don’t believe I like being married, anyway,” 
she fretted; “I like going out to the toll-house for ice¬ 
cream better.” 

Her uncertainty made Blair still more impatient to 
finance his journey; and that day, just after dinner, he 
and Nannie stood quaking at the dining-room door. 
“I-I-l’ll do it,” Blair gasped, with trembling valor. He 
was very little, and his eyes were dilating with fright. 
“I’ll do it,” he said, chattering. Nannie rushed into 
the breach; Nannie never pretended to be anything but 
a ’fraid-cat except in things that concerned Blair; she 
said now, boldly: 

“ I’m the oldest, so I ought to.” 

She crept across the floor, stopping at every step to 
listen breathlessly; nothing stirred, except her own little 
shadow crouching at her heels. 

“Grab in the top drawer,” Blair hissed after her; and 
she put a shrinkir^ hand into the japanned box, and 
“grabbed” all the bills she could hold; then, not waiting 
to close the drawer, she fled back to Blair. Up-stairs in 
her room, they counted the money. 

“We can travel all round the world!” Blair whispered, 
thrilled at the amount of their loot. 

2.3 


THE IRON WOMAN 


But at the last moment there 'yas a defection—Eliza¬ 
beth backed out. “I’d rather go out to the toll-house for 
ice-cream,” she said; “ice-cream at Mrs. Todd’s is nicer 
than being married. David, don’t you go, either. Let 
Blair and Nannie go. You stay with me.” 

But David was not to be moved. ‘‘I like traveling; 
traveled a good deal all my life; and I want to go 
round the world with Blair.” 

Elizabeth gave him a black look. “You like Blair 
better ’an me,” she said, the tears hot in her amber eyes, 
A minute later she slipped away to hide under the bed in 
her own room, peering out from under a lifted valance for 
a hoped-for pursuer. But no one came; the other three 
were so excited that her absence was hardly noticed. 

How they started, the adventurous ones, late that after¬ 
noon—later, in fact, than they planned, because Blair in¬ 
sisted upon running back to give Harris a parting gift of a 
dollar; “ ’Cause, poor Harris! he can’t go traveling”—how 
they waited in the big, barn-like, foggy station for what 
Blair called the “next train,” how they boarded it for 
“any place”—^all seemed very funny when they were old 
enough to look back upon it. It even seemed funny, a 
day or two afterward, to their alarmed elders. But at 
the time it was not amusing to anybody. David was 
gloomy at being obliged to marry Nannie; “I pretty 
near wish I’d stayed with Elizabeth,” he said, crossly. 
Nannie was frightened, because, she declared, “Mamma 
'11 be mad;—^now I tell you, Blair, she’ll be mad!” And 
Blair was sulky because he had no wife. Yet, in spite of 
these varying emotions, pushed by Blair’s resolution, they 
really did venture forth to “travel all around the world!” 

As for the grown people’s feelings about the elopement, 
they ran the gamut from panic to amusement. , . . At a 
little after five o’clock, Miss White heard sobbing in 
Elizabeth’s room, and going in, found the little gir] 
blacking her boots and crying furiously, 

28 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ Elizabeth! my lamb! What is the matter ?” 

“ I have a great many sorrows,” said Elizabeth, with a 
hiccup of despair. 

‘‘But what are you doing?” 

“ I am blacking my red shoes,” Elizabeth wailed; and 
so she was, the blacking-sponge on its shaky wire drip¬ 
ping all over the carpet. “My beautiful red shoes; I 
am blacking them; and now they are spoiled forever.” 

“But why do you want to spoil them?” gasped Miss 
White, struggling to take the blacking-bottle away from 
her. “Elizabeth, tell me immejetly! What has hap¬ 
pened?” 

“I didn’t go on the journey,” said Elizabeth; “and 
David wouldn’t stay at home with me; he liked Blair and 
Nannie better ’an me. He hurt my feelings; so pretty 
soon right away I got mad—mad—mad—to think he 
wouldn’t stay with me. I always get mad if my feelings 
are hurt, and David Richie is always hurting ’em. I 
despise him for making me mad! I despise him for 
treating me so— hideous! And so I took a hate to my 
shoes.” The ensuing explanation sent Miss White, 
breathless, to tell Mrs. Richie; but Mrs. Richie was not 
at home. 

When David did not appear that afternoon after 
school, Mrs. Richie was disturbed. By three o’clock she 
was uneasy; but it was nearly five before the quiver of 
apprehension grew into positive fright; then she put on 
her things and walked down to the Maitland house. 

“Is David here?” she demanded when Harris an¬ 
swered her ring; “please go up-stairs and look, Harris; 
they may be playing in the nursery. I am worried.” 

Harris shuffled off, and Mrs. Richie, following him to 
the foot of the stairs, stood there gripping the newel-post. 

“They ain’t here,” Harris announced from the top 
landing. 

Mrs. Richie sank down on the lowest step. 

“ Harris 1” some one called peremptorily, and she turned 

29 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to see Robert Ferguson coming out of the dining-room: 

Oh, you’re here, Mrs. Richie ? I suppose you are on 
David’s track. I thought Harris might have some clue. 
I came down to tell Mrs. Maitland all we could wring 
from Elizabeth.” 

Before she could ask what he meant, Blair’s mother 
joined them. “ I haven’t a doubt they are playing in the 
orchard,” she said. 

“No, they’re not,” her superintendent contradicted; 
“Elizabeth says they were going to ‘travel’; but that’s 
all we could get out of her.” 

“‘Travel’! Oh, what does she mean?” Mrs. Richie 
said; “ I’m so frightened!” 

“What’s the use of being frightened?” Mrs. Maitland 
asked, curiously; “it won’t bring them back if they are 
lost, will it?” 

Robert Ferguson knocked his glasses off fiercely. 
“They couldn’t be lost in Mercer,” he reassured David’s 
mother. 

“Well, whether they’ve run away or not, come into 
my room and talk about it like a sensible woman,” said 
Mrs. Maitland; “what’s the use of sitting on the stairs? 
Women have such a way of sitting on stairs when things 
go wrong! Suppose they are lost. What harm’s done? 
They’ll turn up. Come!” Mrs. Richie came. Every¬ 
body “came” or went, or stood still, when Mrs. Mait¬ 
land said the word! And though not commanded, Mro 
Ferguson came too. 

In the dining-room Mrs. Maitland took no part in the 
perplexed discussion that followed. At her desk, in her 
revolving chair, she had instinctively taken up her pen; 
there was a perceptible instant in which she got her mind 
off her own affairs and put it on this matter of the chil¬ 
dren. Then she laid the pen down, and turned around 
to face the other two; but idleness irritated her, and she 
reached for a ball of pink worsted skewered by bone 
needles. She asked no questions and made no com- 

.so 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ments, but knitting rapidly, listened, until apparently 
her patience came to an end; then with a grunt she 
whirled round to her desk and again picked up her pen. 
But as she did so she paused, pen in air; threw it down, 
and pounding the flat of her hand on her desk, laughed 
loudly: 

“I know! I know!” And revolving back again in 
leisurely relief to face them, she said, with open amuse¬ 
ment: “When I came home this afternoon, I found this 
drawer half open and the bills in my cash-box disturbed. 
They’ve”—her voice was suddenly drowned in the 
rumble of a train on the spur track; the house shook 
slightly, and a gust of black smoke was vomited against 
the windows;—“they’ve helped themselves and gone off 
to enjoy it! We’ll get on their trail at the railroad 
station. That’s what Elizabeth meant by ‘ traveling.’ ” 

Mrs. Richie turned terrified eyes toward Mr. Ferguson. 

“Why, of course!” he said, “the monkeys!” 

But Mrs. Richie seemed more frightened than even 
“ The railroad!— Oh —’ ’ 

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Maitland; “they’re all right. 
The ticket-agent will remember them. Mr. Ferguson, 
telegraph to their destination, wherever it is, and have 
them shipped back. No police help at this end yet, if 
you please.” 

Robert Ferguson nodded. “Of course everything is 
all right,” he said. “I’ll let you know the minute I find 
traces of them, Mrs. Richie.” When he reached the 
door, he came back. “Now don’t you worry; I could 
thrash thdse boys for bothering you!” At which she 
tried to smile, but there was a quiver in her chin. 

“Harris!” Mrs. Maitland broke in, “supper! Mrs. 
Richie, you are going to have something to eat.” 

“Oh, I can’t—” 

“ What ? You are not saying canHf ‘Can’t ’ is a ‘bad 
word; ’ you know.” She got up—a big, heavy woman, in 
a gray bag of a dress that only reached to the top of her 
3 31 


THE IRON WOMAN 


boots—and stood with her hands on her hips; her gray 
hair was twisted into a small, tight knot at the back of 
her head, and her face looked like iron that had once been 
molten and had cooled into roughened immobility. It 
was not an unamiable face; as she stood there looking 
down at Mrs. Richie she even smiled the half-amused 
smile one might bestow on a puppy, and she put a kindly 
hand on the other mother’s shoulder. “Don’t be so 
scared, woman! They’ll be found.” 

“ You don’t think anything could have happened to 
him?” Mrs. Richie said, trembling; “you don’t think 
he could have been run over, or—or anything?” She 
clutched at the big hand and clung to it. 

“No,” Mrs. Maitland said, dryly; “I don’t think any¬ 
thing has happened to him'' 

Mrs. Richie had the grace to blush. “Of course I 
meant Blair and Nannie, too,” she murmured. 

“You never thought of ’em!” Mrs. Maitland said, 
chuckling; “now you must have some supper.” 

They were in the midst of it when a note came from 
Mr. Ferguson to say that he was on the track of the run¬ 
aways. He had sent a despatch that would insure their 
being returned by the next train, and he was himself 
going half-way up the road to meet them. Then a post¬ 
script: “Tell Mrs. Richie not to worry.” 

“Doesn’t seem much disturbed about my worry,” said 
Mrs. Maitland, jocosely significant; then with loud cheer¬ 
fulness she tried to rally her guest: “ It’s all right; what 
did I tell you? Where’s my knitting? Come; I’ll go 
over to the parlor with you; we’ll sit there.” 

Mrs. Maitland’s parlor was not calculated to cheer a 
panic-stricken mother. It was a vast room, rather 
chilly on this foggy November evening, and smelling of 
soot. On its remote ceiling was a design in delicate 
relief of garlands and wreaths, which the dingy years 
had not been able to rob of its austere beauty. Two 
veined black-marble columns supported an arch that 

32 


THE IRON WOMAN 

divided the desert of the large room into two smaller 
rooms, each of which had the center-table of the period, 
its bleak white-marble top covered with elaborately- 
gilded books that no one ever opened. Each room had, 
too, a great cut - glass chandelier, swathed in brown 
paper - muslin and looking like a gigantic withered 
pear. Each had its fireplace, with a mantelpiece of 
funereal marble to match the pillars. Mrs. Maitland 
had refurnished this parlor when she came to the old 
house as a bride; she banished to the lumber-room, or 
even to the auctioneer’s stand, the heavy, stately mahog¬ 
any of the early part of the century, and purchased 
according to the fashion of the day, glittering rosewood, 
carved and gilded and as costly as could be found. Be¬ 
tween the windows at each end of the long room were 
mirrors in enormous gilt frames; the windows themselves, 
topped with cornices and heavy lambrequins, were hung, 
with crimson brocade; a grand piano, very bare and 
shining, sprawled sidewise between the black columns 
of the arch, and on the wall opposite the fireplaces were 
four large landscapes in oil, of exactly the same size. 
“Herbert likes pictures,” the bride said to herself when 
she purchased them. “That goose Molly Wharton 
wouldn’t have been able to buj^ ’em for him!” The only 
pleasant thing in the meaningless room was Nannie’s 
drawing-board, which displayed the little girl’s pains¬ 
taking and surprisingly exact copy in lead-pencil, of 
some chromo—“Evangeline” perhaps, or some popular 
sentimentality of the sixties. In the ten years which 
had elapsed since Mrs. Maitland had plunged into her 
debauch of furnishing—her one extravagance!—of course 
the parlors had softened; the enormous roses of the car¬ 
pets had faded, the glitter of varnish had dimmed; but 
the change was not sufficient to blur in Mrs. Maitland’s 
eyes, all the costly and ugly glory of the room. She 
cast a complacent glance about her as she motioned 
her nervous and preoccupied guest to a chair. “How 

33 


THE IRON WOMAN 

do you like Mercer?” she said, beginning to knit rap- 
idly. 

“ Oh, very well; it is a little—smoky,” Mrs. Richie said, 
glancing at the clock. 

Mrs. Maitland grunted. “Mercer would be in a bad 
way without its smoke. You ought to learn to like it, as 
I do! I like the smell of it, I like the taste of it, I like the 
feel of it!” 

“Really?” Mrs. Richie murmured; she was watching 
the clock. 

“ That smoke, let me tell you Mrs. Richie is the pillar 
of cloud, to this country! (If you read your Bible, you’ll 
know what that means.) I think of it whenever I look 
at my stacks.” 

Mrs. Maitland’s resentment at her guest’s mild critic 
cism was obvious; but Mrs. Richie did not notice it. 
“I think I’ll go down to the station and meet the chil¬ 
dren,” she said, rising. 

“I’m afraid you are a very foolish woman,” Sarah 
Maitland said;—and Mrs. Richie sat down. “Mr. Fer¬ 
guson will bring ’em here. Anyway, this clock is half an 
hour slow. They’ll be here before you could get to the 
station.” She chuckled, slyly. Her sense of humor 
was entirely rudimentary, and never got beyond the 
practical joke. “I’ve been watching you look at that 
clock,”she said; then she looked at it herself and frowned. 
She was wasting a good deal of time over this business of 
the children. But in spite of herself, glancing at the 
graceful figure sitting in tense waiting at the fireside, she 
smiled. “ You are a pretty creature,” she said; and Mrs. 
Richie started and blushed like a girl. “If Robert 
Ferguson had any sense!” she went on, and paused to 
pick up a dropped stitch. “Queer fellow, isn’t he?” 
Mrs. Richie had nothing to say. “Something went 
wTong with him when he was young, just after he left 
college. Some kind of a crash. Woman scrape, I sup¬ 
pose. Have you ever noticed that women make all the 

.^4 


THE IRON WOMAN 


trouble in the world? Well, he never got over it. He 
told me once that Life wouldn’t play but one trick on 
him. ‘We’re always going to sit down on a chair—and 
Life pulls it from under us,’ he said. ‘ It won’t do that to 
me twice.’ He’s not given to being confidential, but 
that put me on the track. And now he’s got Elizabeth 
on his hands.” 

“She’s a dear little thing,” Mrs. Richie said, smiling; 
“though I confess she always fights shy of me; she 
doesn’t like me. I’m afraid.” 

Mrs. Maitland lifted an eyebrow. “ She’s a corked-up 
volcano. Robert Ferguson ought to get married, and 
give her an aunt to look after her.” She glanced at 
Mrs. Richie again, with appraising eyes; “pity he hasn’t 
more sense.” 

“I think I hear a carriage,” Mrs. Richie said, coldly. 
Then she forgot Mrs. Maitland, and stood waiting and 
trembling. A minute later Mr. Ferguson ushered the 
three sleepy, whimpering children into the room, and 
Mrs. Richie caught her grimy, crying little boy in her 
arms and cried with him. “Oh, David, oh, David— 
my darling! How could you frighten mother so!” 

She was on her knees before him, and while her tears 
and kisses fell on his tousled thatch of yellow hair, he 
burrowed his dirty little face among the laces around 
her white throat and bawled louder than ever. Mrs. 
Maitland, her back to the fireplace, her hands on her 
hips, stood looking on; she was very much interested. 
Blair, hungry and sleepy and evidently frightened, was 
nuzzling up against Mrs. Richie, catching at her hand 
and trying to hide behind her skirts; he looked furtively 
at his mother, but he would not meet her eye. 

“Blair,” she said, “go to bed.” 

“Nannie and me want some supper,” said Blair in a 
whisper. 

“You won’t get any. Boys that go traveling at 
supper-time can get their own suppers or go hungry.” 

35 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“It’s my fault, Mamma,” Nannie panted. 

“No, it ain’t!” Blair said quickly, emerging from be¬ 
hind Mrs. Richie; “it was me made her do it.” 

“Well, clear out, clear out! Go to bed, both of you,” 
Mrs. Maitland said. But when the two children had 
scuttled out of the room she struck her knee with her 
fist and laughed immoderately. 

The next morning, when the two children skulked 
palely into the dining-room, they were still frightened. 
Mrs. Maitland, however, did not notice them. She was 
absorbed in trying in the murky light to read the morning 
paper, propped against the silver urn in front of her. 

“Sit down,” she said; “I don’t like children who are 
late for breakfast. Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, these 
things to our use, and us to Thy service and glory. Amen! 
—Harris! Light the gas.” 

Mercer’s daylight was always more or less wan; but in 
the autumn the yellow fogs seemed to press the low- 
hanging smoke down into the great bowl of the hills at 
the bottom of which the town lay, and the wanness 
scarcely lightened, even at high noon. On such days 
the gas in the dining-room—or office, if one prefers to 
call it so—flared from breakfast until dinner time. It 
flared now on two scared little faces. Once Blair lifted 
questioning eyebrows at Harris, and managed when the 
man brought his plate of porridge to whisper, “mad?’* 
At which the sympathetic Harris rolled his eyes speech¬ 
lessly, and the two children grew perceptibly paler. 
But when, abruptly, Mrs. Maitland crumpled her news¬ 
paper together and threw it on the floor, her absorbed 
face showed no displeasure. The fact was, she had for¬ 
gotten the affair of the night before; it was the children’s 
obvious alarm which reminded her that the business of 
scolding and punishing must be attended to. She got 
up from the table and stood behind them, with her back 
to the fire; she began to nibble the upper joint of her 
forefinger, wondering just how to begin. This silent 

36 


THE IRON WOMAN 


inspection of their shoulders made the little creatures 
quiver. Nannie crumbled her bread into a heap, and 
Blair carried an empty spoon to his mouth with auto¬ 
matic regularity; Harris, in the pantry, in a paroxysm of 
sympathy, stretched his lean neck to the crack of the 
half-open door. 

“Children!” 

“Yes, ma’am,” Nannie quavered. 

“Turn round.” 

They turned. Nannie began to cry. Blair twisted a 
button on his coat with a grip that made his fingers white. 

“ Come into my room.” 

The children gasped with dismay. Mrs. Maitland’s 
bedroom was a nightmare of a place to them both. It 
was generally dark, for the lower halves of the inside 
shutters were apt to be closed; but, worse than that, the 
glimmering glass doors of the bookcases that lined the 
walls held a suggestion of mystery that was curiously 
terrifying. Whenever they entered the room, the brother 
and sister always kept a frightened eye on those doors. 
This dull winter morning, when they came quaking 
along behind their mother into this grim place, it was 
still in the squalor of morning confusion. Later, Harris 
would open the shutters and tidy things up; he would 
dust the painted pine bureau and Blair’s photographs and 
the slender green bottle of German cologne on which the 
red ribbons of the calendar were beginning to fade; now 
everything was dark and bleak and covered with dust. 
Mrs. Maitland sat down; the culprits stood hand in hand 
in front of her. 

“ Blair, don’t you know it’s wrong to take what doesn’t 
belong to you?” 

“I took it,” said the ’fraid-cat, faintly; she moved in 
front of her brother as though to protect him. 

“ Blair told you to,” his mother said. 

“Yes,” Blair blurted out, “it was me told her to.” 

“People that take things that don’t belong to them go 
37 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to hell,” Mrs. Maitland said; “haven’t you learned that 
in Sunday-school?” 

Silence. 

“You ought to be punished very severely, Blair—and 
Nannie, too. But I am very busy this morning, so I 
shall only say”—she hesitated; what on earth should she 
say! “that—that you shall lose your allowance for this 
week, both of you.” 

One of them muttered, “ Yes’m.” 

Mrs. Maitland looked as uncomfortable as they did. 
She wondered what to do next. How much simpler a 
furnace was than a child! “Well,” she said, “that’s 
all—at present ”; it had suddenly occurred to her that 
apprehension was a good thing; “a/ present” she re¬ 
peated darkly; “and Blair, remember; thieves go to 
hell.” She watched them with perplexed eyes as they 
hurried out of the room; just as they reached the door 
she called: “Blair!” 

The child stopped short in his tracks and quivered. 

“ Come here.” He came, slowly, his very feet showing 
his reluctance. “Blair,” she said—^in her effort to speak 
gently her voice grated; she put out her hand as if to draw 
him to her, but the child shivered and moved aside. Mrs. 
Maitland looked at him dumbly; then bent toward him, 
and her hands, hanging between her knees, opened and 
closed, and even half stretched out as if in inarticulate en¬ 
treaty. Nannie, in the doorway, sobbing under her breath, 
watched with frightened, uncomprehending eyes. “My 
son,” Sarah Maitland said, with as much mildness as her 
loud voice could express, “ what did you mean to do when 
you ran away?” She smiled, but he would not meet her 
eyes. “Tell me, my boy, why did you run away?” 

Blair tried to speak, cleared his throat, and blurted out 
four husky words: “Don’t like it here.” 

“ Don’t like what ? Your home?” 

Blair nodded. 

“Why not?” she asked, astonished. 

38 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Ugly,” Blair said, faintly. 

“Ugly! What is ugly?” 

Blair, without looking up, made a little, swift gesture 
with his hand. “This,” he said; then suddenly he 
lifted his head, gave her a sidewise, shrinking look, 
and dropped his eyes. The color flew into Mrs. Mait¬ 
land’s face; with an ejaculation of anger, she got on hei 
feet. “ You are a very foolish and very bad little boy,” 
she said; “you don’t know what you are talking about. 
I had meant to increase your allowance, but now I won’t 
do it. Listen to me; it is no matter whether a house, or 
a—a person, is what you call ‘ugly.’ What matters is 
whether they are useful. Everything in the world ought 
to be useful—^like our Works. If I ever hear you saying 
you don’t like a thing because it’s ugly, I shall—I shall 
not give you any money at all. Money!” she burst out, 
suddenly fluent, “money isn’t pretty! Dirty scraps of 
paper, bits of silver that look like lead—perhaps you call 
money ‘ugly,’ too?” 

Her vehemence was a sort of self-defense; it was a 
subtle confession that she felt in this little repelling per-* 
sonality the challenge of an equal; but Blair only gaped 
at her in childish confusion; and instantly his mother 
was herself again. “ Clear out, now; and be a good boy.” 

When she was alone, she sat at her desk in the dining¬ 
room for several minutes without taking up her pen. 
Her face burned from the slap of the child’s words; but 
below the scorch of anger and mortification her heart was 
bruised. He did not like her to put her arm about him! 
She drew a long breath and began to read her letters; 
but all the while she was thinking of that scene in the 
parlor the night before: Blair crouching against Mrs. 
Richie, clinging to her white hand;—involuntarily Sarah 
Maitland looked at her own hand; “ I suppose,” she said 
to herself, “he thinks hers is ‘pretty’! Where does he 
get such notions ? I wonder what kind of a woman she 
is- anyway; she never says anything about her husband.” 

39 


CHAPTER III 


There came a day when Miss White’s little school in 
the garret was broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that 
David and Blair needed a boot instead of a petticoat to 
teach them their Latin—and a few other things, too! 
He had found Mrs. Richie in tears because, under the big 
hawthorn in her own back yard, David had blacked 
Blair’s eye, and had himself achieved a bloody nose. 
Mrs. Richie was for putting on her things to go and apolo¬ 
gize to Mrs. Maitland, and was hardly restrained by her 
landlord’s snort of laughter. 

“Next time I hope he’ll give him two black eyes, and 
Blair will loosen one of his front teeth!’’ said Mr. Fergu¬ 
son. 

David’s mother was speechless with horror. 

“ That’s the worst of trusting a boy to a good woman,” 
he barked, knocking off his glasses angrily; “but I’ll do 
what I can to thwart you! I’ll make sure there isn’t any 
young-eyed cherubin business about David. He has got 
to go to boarding-school, and learn something besides 
his prayers. If somebody doesn’t rescue him from 
apron-strings, he’ll be a ‘very, very good young man’ 
—and then may the Lord have mercy on his soul!” 

“I didn’t know anybody could be too good,” Mrs. 
Richie ventured. 

“A woman can’t be too good, but a man oughtn’t to 
be,” her landlord instructed her. 

David’s mother was too bewildered by such sentiments 
to protest—^although, indeed, Mr. Ferguson need not 
have been quite so concerned about David’s “goodness.” 

40 


THE IRON WOMAN 


This freckled, clear-eyed youngster, with straight yellow 
hair and good red cheeks, was just an honest, grovvly 
boy, who dropped his clothes about on the floor of his 
room, and whined over his lessons, and blustered largely 
when out of his mother’s hearing; furthermore, he had 
already experienced his first stogie—with a consequent 
pallor about the gills that scared Mrs. Richie nearly to 
death. But Robert Ferguson’s jeering reference to 
apron-strings resulted in his being sent to boarding- 
school. Blair went with him, “rescued” from the good- 
woman regime of Cherry-pie’s instruction by Mr. Fergu¬ 
son’s advice to Mrs. Maitland; “although,” Robert 
Ferguson admitted, candidly, “he doesn’t need it as poor 
David does; his mother wouldn’t know how to nq^ke a 
Miss Nancy of him, even if she wanted to!” Then, with 
a sardonic guess at Mrs. Richie’s unspoken thought, he 
added that Mrs. Maitland would not dream of going to 
live in the town where her son was at school. “ She has 
sense enough to know that Blair, or any other boy 
worth his salt, would hate his mother if she tagged on 
behind,” said Mr. Ferguson; “of course you would never 
Slink of doing such a thing, either,” he ended, iron¬ 
ically. 

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Richie, faintly. So it was 
that, assisted by her landlord, David’s mother thrust 
her one chicken out into the world unprotected by her 
hovering wing. About the time Miss White lost her two 
masculine pupils, the girls began to go to a day-school in 
Mercer, Cherry-pie’s entire deposition as a teacher being 
brought about because, poor lady! she fumbled badly 
when it came to a critical moment with Elizabeth. It 
all grew out of one of the child’s innumerable squabbles 
with David—she got along fairly peaceably with Blair. 
She and Nannie had been comparing pigtails, and Da¬ 
vid had asserted that Elizabeth’s hair was “the nicest”; 
which so gratified her that she first hugged him violently, 
and then invited him to take her out rowing. 

41 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I’ll pay for the boat!” she said, and pirouetted around 
the room, keeping time with: 

“‘Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful! 

Oh, that will be—’ 

♦Uncle gave me a dollar yesterday,” she interrupted her¬ 
self, breathlessly. 

To this David, patiently straightening his collar after 
that ecstatic embrace, objected; but his magnanimity 
vras lessened by his explanation that he wasn’t going 
to have any girl pay for him! This ruffled Elizabeth’s 
pride for a moment; however, she was not averse to 
saving her dollar, so everything was arranged. David 
was to row her to Willis’s, a country tavern two miles 
down the river, where, as all middle-aged Mercer will 
remember, the best jumbles in the world could be pur¬ 
chased at the agreeable price of two for a cent. Eliza¬ 
beth, who was still congratulating herself on having 
“nicer hair than Nannie,” and who loved the river (and 
the jumbles), was as punctual as a clock in arriving at the 
covered bridge where at the toll-house wharf they were 
to meet and embark. She had even been so forehanded 
as to bargain with Mrs. Todd for the hire of the skiff, in 
which she immediately seated herself, the tiller-ropes in 
her hands, all ready for David to take the oars. “And 
I’ve waited, and waited, and waited!” she told herself 
angrily, as she sat there in the faintly rocking skiff. And 
after an hour of waiting, what should she see but David 
Richie racing on the bridge with Blair Maitland! He 
had just simply forgotten his engagement! (Elizabeth 
was so nearly a young lady that she said “engagement.”) 

“I’ll never forgive him,” she said, and the dimple 
hardened in her cheek. Sitting in the boat, she looked up 
at the two boys, David in advance, a young, lithe figure, 
in cotton small-clothes and jersey, leaping in great, beau¬ 
tiful strides, on and on and on, his face glowing, his eyes 

42 


THE IRON WOMAN 


like stars; then, alas, he gave a downward glance and 
there was Elizabeth, waiting fiercely in the skiff! His 
“engagement” came back to him; there was just one 
astonished, faltering instant; and in it, of course, Blair 
shot ahead! It must be confessed that in his rage at 
being beaten David promptly forgot Elizabeth again, for 
though she waited still a little longer for him and his 
apology, no David appeared, he and Blair being occupied 
in wrangling over their race. She went home in a slowly 
gathering passion. David had forgotten her! “He likes 
Blair better than me; he’d rather race with another boy 
than go out in a boat with me; and I said I’d pay for it— 
and I’ve only got one dollar in the whole world!” At 
that stab of self-pity a tear ran down the side of her nose 
(and she was still a whole block away from home!); 
when it reached her lip, she was obliged to put her 
tongue out furtively and lick it away. But repression 
made the outbreak, when it came, doubly furious. She 
burst in upon Miss White, her dry eyes blazing with rage. 

“He made me wait; he didn’t come; I hate him. I’ll 
never speak to him again. He hurt my feelings. He is 
a beast.” 

“Elizabeth! You mustn’t use such unladylike words! 
When I was a young lady I never even heard such words. 
Oh, my lamb, if you don’t control your temper, some¬ 
thing dreadful will happen to you some day!” 

“ I hope something dreadful will happen to him some 
day,” said Elizabeth. And with that came the tears—a 
torrential rain, through which the lightning played and 
the thunder crashed. Miss White in real terror, left her, 
to get some smelling-salts, and the instant she was alone 
Elizabeth ran across the room and stood before her 
mirror; then she took a pair of scissors in her shaking 
hand and hacked off lock after lock, strand after strand, 
of her shining hair. When it was done, she looked at 
the russet stubble that was left with triumphant rage. 
“There, now! I guess he won’t think my hair is nicer 

43 


THE IRON WOMAN 


than Nannie’s any more. I hate him!” she said, and 
laughed out loud, her vivid face wet and quivering. 

Miss White, hurrying in, heard the laugh, and stood 
transfixed: ” Elizabeth!” The poor, ugly, shorn head, 
the pile of gleaming hair on the bureau, the wicked, tear- 
stained, laughing face brought the poor lady’s heart 
into her throat. ” Elizabeth!” she faltered again; and 
Elizabeth ran and flung her arms about her neck. 

“David forgot all about me,” she sobbed. “He is 
always hurting my feelings! And I can’t hear to have 
my feelings hurt. Oh, Cherry-pie, kiss me! Kiss me!” 

That was the end of the outburst; the ensuing peni¬ 
tence was unbridled and temporary. The next morning 
she waylaid David to offer him some candy, which he 
took with serene unconsciousness of any bad behavior 
on his part. 

“Awfully sorry I forgot about Willis’s,” he said casu¬ 
ally; and took a hearty handful of candy. 

Elizabeth, looking into the nearly empty box, winced; 
then said, bravely, “Take some more.” He took a good 
deal more. 

“David, I—I’m sorry I cut my hair.” 

“Why, I didn’t notice,” David said, wrinkling up his 
freckled nose and glancing at her with some interest. 
“ It looks awfully, doesn’t it ?” 

“David, don’t tell your mother, will you? She looks 
so sort of horrified when I’ve been provoked. It almost 
makes me mad again,” Elizabeth said, candidly. 

“Materna thinks it’s dreadful in you.” 

“ Do you mind about my hair ?” Elizabeth asked. 

David laughed uproariously. “ Why on earth should I 
mind ? If I were a girl, you bet I’d keep my hair cut.” 

“Do you forgive me?” she said, in a whisper; “if you 
don’t forgive me, I shall die.” 

“Forgive you?” said David, astonished, his mouth full 
of candy; “why, it’s nothing to me if you cut off your 
hair. Only I shouldn’t think you’d want to look so like 

44 


THE IRON WOMAN 


‘Sam Hill/ But I tell you what, Elizabeth; you’re too 
thin-skinned. What’s the use of geting mad over every 
little thing?” 

” It wasn’t so very little, to be forgotten.” 

‘‘Well, yes; I suppose you were disappointed, but—” 

Elizabeth’s color began to rise. ‘‘Oh, I wasn’t so 
terribly disappointed. You needn’t flatter yourself. I 
simply don’t like to be insulted.” 

‘‘Ah, now, Elizabeth,” he coaxed, ‘‘there you go 
again!” 

‘‘No, I don’t. I’m not angry. Only—you went with 
Blair; you didn’t want—” she choked, and flew back into 
the house, deaf to his clumsy and troubled explanations. 

In Miss White’s room, Elizabeth announced her inten¬ 
tion of entering a convent, and it was then that Cherry- 
pie fumbled: she took the convent seriously! The next 
morning she broke the awful news to Elizabeth’s uncle. 
It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson—who had not 
time to read his Bible for pressure of business—had 
gone out into the grape-arbor in his narrow garden to 
feed the pigeons. There was a crowd of them about his 
feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray bos¬ 
oms pushing and jostling against one another, and their 
pink feet actually touching his boots. When Miss White 
burst out at him, the pigeons rose in startled flight, and 
Mr. Ferguson frowned. 

‘‘And she says,” Miss White ended, almost in tears— 
‘‘ she says she is going to enter a convent immejetly 1” 

‘‘My dear Miss White,” said Elizabeth’s uncle, grimly, 
“there’s no such luck.” 

Miss White positively reeled. Then he explained, and 
Cherry-pie came nearer to her employer in those ten 
minutes than in the ten years in which she had looked 
after his niece. “ I don’t care about Elizabeth’s temper; 
she’ll get over that. And I don’t care a continental about 
her hair or her religion; she can wear a wig or be a Mo¬ 
hammedan if it keeps her straight. She has a bad in- 

45 


THE IRON WOMAN 


heritance, Miss White; I would be only too pleased to 
know that she was shut up in a convent, safe and sound. 
But this whim isn’t worth talking about.” 

Miss White retired, nibbling with horror, and that 
night Robert Ferguson went in to tell his neighbor his 
worries. 

“What am I to do with her ?” he groaned. 

“She cut off her hair?” Mrs. Richie repeated, as¬ 
tounded ; ‘ ‘ but why ? How perfectly irrational! ’ ’ 

“Don’t say ‘how irrational’; say ‘how Elizabeth.’” 

“I wish she would try to control her temper,” Mrs. 
Richie said, anxiously. 

But Mr. Ferguson was not troubled about that. “ She’s 
vain; that’s what worries me. She cried all afternoon 
about her hair.” 

“She needs a stronger hand than kind Miss White’s,” 
Mrs. Richie said; “why not send her to school?” And 
the harassed uncle sighed with relief at the idea, which 
was put into immediate execution. 

With growing hair and the wholesome companionship 
of other girls, of course the ascetic impulse died a natural 
death; but the temper did not die. It only hid itself 
under that sense of propriety which is responsible for so 
much of our good behavior. When it did break loose, 
the child suffered afterward from the consciousness of 
having made a fool of herself—which is a wholesome 
consciousness so far as it goes—but it did not go very 
far with Elizabeth; she never suffered in any deeper 
way. She took her temper for granted; she was not 
complacent about it; she did not credit it to “tem¬ 
perament,” she was merely matter of fact; she said 
she “couldn’t help it.” “I don’t want to get mad,” 
she used to say to Nannie; “and of course I never mean 
any of the horrid things I say. I’d like to be good, 
like you; but I can’t help being wicked.” Between 
those dark moments of being “wicked” she was a joy¬ 
ous, unself-conscious girl of generous loves, which she 

46 


THE IRON WOMAN 


expressed as primitively as she did her angers; indeed, 
in the expression of affection Elizabeth had the exquisite 
and sometimes embarrassing innocence of a child who 
has been brought up by a sad old bachelor and a timid 
old maid. As for her angers, they were followed by 
irrational efforts to “make up” with any one she felt 
she had wronged. She spent her little pocket-money 
in buying presents for her maleficiaries, she invented 
punishments for herself; and generally she confessed her 
sin with humiliating fullness. Once she confessed to 
her uncle, thereby greatly embarrassing him: 

“Uncle, I want you to know I am a great sinner; 
probably the chief of sinners,” she said, breathing hard. 
She had come into his library after supper, and was 
standing with a hand on the back of his chair; her 
eyes were bright vrith unshed tears. 

“Good gracious!” said Robert Ferguson, looking at her 
blankly over his glasses, “what on earth have you been 
doing now?” 

“ I got mad, and I chopped up the feather in Cherry- 
pie’s new bonnet, and I told her she was a hideous, 
monstrous old donkey-hag.” 

“Elizabeth!” ’ 

“I did.” 

“Have you apologized?” 

“Yes,” said Elizabeth; “but what’s the good of ’polo- 
gizing? I said it. ’Course I ’pologized; and I kissed 
her muddy rubbers when she wasn’t looking; and I 
gave her all my money for a new feather”—she stopped, 
and sighed deeply; “and here is the money you gave 
me to go to the theater. So now I haven’t any money 
at all, in the world.” 

Poor Robert Ferguson, with a despairing jerk at the 
I black ribbon of his glasses, leaned back in his chair, help- 
^less with perplexity. Why on earth did she give him 
back his money ? He could not follow her mental proc¬ 
esses. He said as much to Mrs. Richie the next time he 

47 


4 


THE IRON WOMAN 


went to see her. He went to see her quite often in those 
days. For the convenience of David and Elizabeth, a 
doorway had been cut in the brick wall between the two 
gardens, and Mr. Ferguson used it frequently. In their 
five or six years of living next door to each other the 
acquaintance of these two neighbors had deepened into 
a sort of tentative intimacy, which they never quite 
thought of as friendship, but which permitted many 
confidences about their two children. 

And when they talked about their children, they spoke, 
of course, of the other two, for one could not think of 
David without remembering Blair, or talk of Elizabeth 
without contrasting her with Nannie. Nannie had none 
of that caroling vitality which made the younger girl an 
acute anxiety and a perpetual delight. She was like a 
little plant growing in the shade —a gently good child, 
who never gave anybody any trouble; she continued to 
be a ’fraid-cat, and looked under the bed every night 
for a burglar. With Blair at boarding-school her life 
was very solitary, for of course there was no intimacy 
between her and her stepmother. Mrs. Maitland was 
invariably kind to her, and astonishingly patient with 
the rather dull little mind—one of those minds that are 
like softly tangled skeins of single zephyr; if you try to 
unwind the mild, elusive thoughts, they only knot tightly 
upon themselves, and the result is a half-frightened and 
very obstinate silence. But Mrs. Maitland never tried 
to unwind Nannie’s thoughts; she used to look at her 
sometimes in kindly amusement, as one might look at a 
kitten or a canary; and sometimes she said to Robert 
Ferguson that Nannie was like her own mother;—“but 
Blair has brains!” she would say, complacently. 
School did not give the girl the usual intense friendships, 
and except, for Elizabeth, she had no companions; her 
one interest was Blair, and her only occupation out of 
school hours was her drawing—which was nothing more 
than endless, meaningless copying. It was Nannie’s 
48 


THE IRON WOMAN 


essential child-likeness that kept her elders, and indeed 
David and Blair too, from understanding that she and 
Elizabeth were no longer little girls. Perhaps the boys 
first realized Elizabeth’s age when they simultaneously 
discovered that she was pretty. . . . 

Elizabeth’s long braids had been always attractive 
to the masculine eye; they had suggested jokes about 
pigtails, and much of that peculiar humor so pleasing tr 
the young male; but the summer that she “put u^ 
her hair,” the puppies, so to speak, got their eyes open. 
When the boys saw those soft plaits, no longer hanging 
within easy reach of a rude and teasing hand, but folded 
around her head behind her little ears; when they saw 
the small curls breaking over and through the brown 
braids that were flecked with gilt, and the stray locks, 
like feathers of spun silk, clustering in the nape of her 
neck; when David and Blair saw these things—it was 
about the time their voices were showing amazing and 
ludicrous register—something below the artless brutali¬ 
ties of the boys’ sense of humor was touched. They took 
abruptly their first perilous step out of boyhood. Of 
course they did not know it. . . . The significant mo¬ 
ment came one afternoon when they all went out to 
the toll-house for ice-cream. There was a little delay at 
the gate, while the boys wrangled as to who should stand 
treat. “I’ll pull straws with you,” said Blair; Blair’s 
pleasant, indolent mind found the appeal to chance the 
easiest way to settle things, but he was always good- 
natured when, as now, the verdict was against him. 
“ Come on,” he commanded, gayly, “ I’ll shell out!” Mrs. 
Todd, who had begun to dispense pink and brown ice¬ 
cream for them when they were very little children, winked 
and nodded as they all came in together, and made a jo¬ 
cose remark about “ handsome couples”; then she trundled 
off to get the ice-cream, leaving them in the saloon. This 
“saloon” was an ell of the toll-house; it opened on a 
little garden, from which a flight of rickety steps led 


THE IRON WOMAN 


down to a float where half a dozen skiffs were tied up, 
waiting to be hired. In warm weather, when the garden 
was blazing with fragrant color, Mrs. Todd would permit 
favored patrons to put their small tables out among the 
marigolds and zinnias and sit and eat and talk. The 
saloon itself had Nottingham-lace window-curtains, and 
crewel texts enjoining remembrance of the Creator, and 
calling upon Him to “bless our home.” The tables, 
with marble tops translucent from years of spilled ice¬ 
cream, had each a worsted mat, on which w'as a glass 
vase full of blue paper roses; on the ceiling there was a 
wonderful star of scalloped blue tissue-paper—ostensibly 
to allure flies, but hanging there -winter and summer, year 
in and year out. Between the windows that looked out 
on the river stood a piano, draped wdth a festooning 
scarf of bandanna handkerchiefs. These things seemed 
to Blair, at this stage of his esthetic development, very 
satisfying, and part of his pleasure in “treating” came 
from his surroundings; he used to look about him envi¬ 
ously, thinking of the terrible dining-room at home; and 
on sunny days he used to look, with even keener pleasure, 
at the reflected ripple of light, striking up from the river 
below, and moving endlessly across the fly-specked ceiling. 
Watching the play of moving light, he would put his tin 
spoon into his tumbler of ice-cream and taste tne snowy 
mixture with a slow prolongation of pleasure, while the 
two girls chattered like sparrows, and David listened, 
saying very little and always ready to let Elizabeth finish 
his ice-cream after she had devoured her own. 

It was on one of these occasions that Blair, watching 
that long ripple on the ceiling, suddenly saw the sunshine 
sparkle on Elizabeth’s hair, and his spoon paused mid¬ 
way to his lips. “Oh, say, isn’t Elizabeth’s hair nice?’l 
he said. * 

David turned and looked at it. “I’ve seen lots of girls 
with hair like that,” he said; but he sighed, and scratched 
his left ankle with his right foot. Blair, smiling to him- 

50 


THE IRON WOMAN 


self, put out a hesitating finger and touched a shimmering 
curl, upon which Elizabeth ducked and laughed, and 
dancing over to the old tin pan of a ^iano pounded out 
“ Shoo Fly " with one finger. Blair, watching the lovely 
color in her cheek, said in honest delight: “ When your face 
gets red like that, you are awfully good-looking, Elizabeth. ’ ’ 

“Good-looking”; that was a new idea to the four 
triends. Nannie gaped; Elizabeth giggled; David “got 
red” on his own account, and muttered under his breath, 
“Tell that to the marines!” But into Blair’s face had 
come, suddenly, a new expression; his eyes smiled 
vaguely; he came sidling over to Elizabeth and stood 
beside her, sighing deeply: “ Elizabeth, you are an awful 
nice girl.” 

Elizabeth shrieked with laughter. “Listen to Blair— 
he’s spoony!” 

Instantly Blair was angry; “spooniness” vanished in a 
flash; he did not speak for fully five minutes. Just as 
they started home, however, he came out of his glumness 
to remember Miss White. “I’m going to take Cherry- 
pie some ice-cream,” he said; and all the way back he 
was so absorbed in trying—unsuccessfully—to keep the 
pallid pink contents of the mussy paper box from drip¬ 
ping on his clothes that he was able to forget Elizabeth’s 
rudeness. But childhood, for all four of them, ended 
that afternoon. 

When vacation was over, and they were back in the 
harness again, both boys forgot that first tremulous 
clutch at the garments of life; in fact, like all wholesome 
boys of fifteen or sixteen, they thought “girls” a bore. 
It was not until the next long vacation that the old, 
happy, squabbling relationship began to be tinged with a 
new consciousness. It was the elemental instinct, the 
everlasting human impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, 
both of them, grew shy and turned red at unexpected 
moments. The girls developed a certain condescension 
of manner, which was very confusing and irritating to 

SI 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the boys. Elizabeth, as unaware of herself as the bud 
that has not opened to the bee, sighed a good deal, and 
repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her. 
She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a 
disagreeable smell, “I shall never get married,” said 
Elizabeth; “I hate boys.” Nannie did not hate any¬ 
body, but she thought she would rather be a missionary 
than marry;—“though I’m afraid I’d be afraid of the 
savages,” she confessed, timorously. 

David and Blair were confidential to each other about 
girls in general, and Elizabeth in particular; they said 
she was terribly stand-offish. “Oh, well, she’s a girl,” 
said David; “what can,you expect?” 

“She’s darned good-looking,” Blair blurted out. And 
David said, with some annoyance, “What’s that amount 
to?” He said that, for his part, he didn’t mean to fool 
around after girls. “But I’m older than you, Blair; 
you’ll feel that way when you get to be my age; it’s only 
when a man is very young that he bothers with ’em.” 

“That’s so,” said Blair, gloomily. “Well, I never 
expect to marry.” Blair was very gloomy just then; 
he had come home from school the embodiment of dis¬ 
content. He was old enough now to suffer agonies of 
mortification because of his mother’s occupation. “The 
idea of a lady running an Iron Works!” he said to David, 
who tried rather half-heartedly to comfort him; David 
was complacently sure that his mother wouldn’t run an 
Iron Works! “I hate the whole caboodle,” Blair said, 
angrily. It was his old shrinking from “ugliness.” 
And everything at home was ugly;—the great old house 
in the midst of Maitland’s Shantytown; the darkness and 
grime of it; the smell of soot in the halls; Harris’s slat¬ 
ternly ways; his mother’s big, beautiful, dirty fingers. 
“When she sneezes,” Blair said, grinding his teeth, “I 
could—swear! She takes the roof off.” He grew hot;^ 
with shame when Mrs. Richie, whom he admired pro¬ 
foundly, came to take supper with his mother at the 

52 


THE IRON WOMAN 


office table with its odds and ends of china. (As the old 
Canton dinner service had broken and fire-cracked, 
Harris had replenished the shelves of the china-closet 
according to his own taste limited by Mrs. Maitland’s 
economic orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or 
vulgar, or uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with 
a violence that betrayed real suffering. For it is suf¬ 
fering when the young creature finds itself ashamed of 
father or mother. Instinctively the child is proud of 
the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest 
point, its sense of conventionality — for nothing is as 
conventional as adolescence — that natural instinct is 
headed off, and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Mait¬ 
land, living in her mixture of squalor and dignity, had no 
time to consider such abstractions. As for there being 
anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea 
never entered her head. To Sarah Maitland, no work 
which it was a woman’s duty to do could be unwomanly; 
she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity, but 
to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, 
to her way of thinking, just the plain common sense of 
duty. But more than that, the heart in her bosom would 
have proved her sex to her; how she loved to knit the 
pink socks for dimpled little feet! how she winced when 
her son seemed to shrink from her; how jealous she was 
still of that goose Molly,—^who had been another man’s 
wife for as many years as Herbert Maitland had been in 
his grave. But Blair saw none of these things that might 
have told him that his mother was a very woman. In¬ 
stead, his conventionality was insulted at every turn; 
his love of beauty was outraged. As a result a wall 
was slowly built between the mother and son, a wall 
whose foundations had been laid when the little boy had 
pointed his finger at her and said “uggy.” 

Mrs. Maitland was, of course, perfectly unconscious of 
her son’s hot misery; she was so happy at having him at 
home again that she could not see that he was unhappy 

S3 


THE IRON WOMAN 


at being at home. She was pathetically eager to please 
him. Her theory—if in her absorbed life she could be 
said to have a theory—was that Blair should have 
everything he wanted, so that he should the sooner be 
a man. Money, she thought, would give him every¬ 
thing. She herself wanted nothing money could give, 
except food and shelter; the only use she had for money 
was to make more money; but she realized that other 
people, especially young men, like the things it would 
buy. Twice during that particular vacation for no 
cause except to gratify herself, she gave her son a 
wickedly large check; and once, when Nannie told her 
that he wanted to pay for some painting lessons, though 
she demurred just for a moment, she paid the bill so that 
his own spending-money should not be diminished. 

“What on earth does a man who is going to run an 
Iron Works want with painting lessons?” she said to the 
entreating sister» But even while she made her grum¬ 
bling protest, she wrote a check. 

As for Blair, he took the money, as he took ever 5 rthmg 
else that she gave him of opportunity and happiness, and 
said, “Thank you, mother; you are awfully good”; 
but he shut his eyes when he kissed her~ He was blind 
to the love, the yearning, the outstretched hands of 
motherhood,—^not because he was cruel, or hard, or 
mean; but because he was young, and delighted in beauty, 

Of course his wretchedness lessened after a fortnight 
or so—habit does much to reconcile us to unpleasant¬ 
ness; besides that, his painting was an interest, and his 
voice began to be a delight to him, he used to sing a 
good deal, making Nannie play his accompaniments, and 
sometimes his mother, working in the dining-room, would 
pause a moment, with lifted head, and listen and half 
smile—then fall to work again furiously. j 

But the real solace to his misery and irritation came to^ 
him—a boy still in years—^in the sudden realization of 
Elizabeth I 


CHAPTER IV 


** 1 AM going to have a party,” Blair told Nannie; ” I’ve 
Invited David and Elizabeth, and four fellows; and you 
can ask four girls.” 

Nannie quaked. “Do you mean to have them come 
to supper?” 

'‘You can call it ‘supper*; I call it dinner.” 

‘‘I’m afraid Mamma won’t like it; it will disturb the 
table.” 

“I’m not going to have it in that hole of a dining-room; 
I’m going to have it in the parlor. Harris says he can 
manage perfectly well. We’ll hang a curtain across the 
arch and have the table in the back parlor.” 

“ But Harris can’t wait on us in there, and on Mamma 
in the dining-room,” Nannie objected. 

“We shall have our dinner at seven, after Harris has 
given mother her supper on that beautiful table of 
hers.” 

“But—” said Nannie, 

“You tell her about it,” Blair coaxed; “she’ll take 
anything from you.” 

Nannie yielded. Instructed by Blair, she hinted 
his purpose to Mrs. Maitland, who to her surprise con¬ 
sented amiably enough. 

“I’ve no objections. And the back parlor is a very 
sensible arrangement. It would be a nuisance to have 
you in here; I don’t like to have things moved. Now 
clear out! Clear out! I must go to work.” A week 
later she issued her orders: “ Mr. Ferguson, I’ll be obliged 
if you’ll come to supper to-morrow night. Blair has 

55 


THE IRON WOMAN 


some kind of a bee in his bonnet about having a party. 
Of course it’s nonsense, but I suppose that’s to be ex¬ 
pected at his age.” 

Robert Ferguson demurred. “The boy doesn’t want 
me; he has asked a dozen young people.” 

Mrs. Maitland lifted one eyebrow. “I didn’t heai 
about the dozen young people; I thought it was only two 
or three besides David and Elizabeth; however, I don’t 
mind. I’ll go the whole hog. He can have a dozen, if 
he wants to. As for his not wanting you, what has that 
got to do with it? I want you. It’s my house, and my 
table; and I’ll ask who I please. I’ve asked Mrs. Richie,” 
she ended, and gave him a quick look. 

“Well,” her superintendent said, indifferently, “I’ll 
come; but it’s hard on Blair.” When he went home 
that night, he summoned Miss White. “ I hope you have 
arranged to have Elizabeth look properly for Blair’s 
party ? Don’t let her be vain about it, but have her look 
right.” And on the night of the great occasion, just 
before they started for Mrs. Maitland’s, he called his 
niece into his library, and knocking off his glasses, looked 
her over with grudging eyes: “Don’t get your head 
turned, Elizabeth. Remember, it isn’t fine feathers 
that make fine birds,” he said; and never knew that he 
was proud of her! 

Elizabeth, bubbling with laughter, holding her skirt 
out in small, white-gloved hands, made three dancing 
steps, dipped him a great courtesy, then ran to him, and 
before he knew it, caught him round the neck and kissed 
him. “You dear, darling, precious uncle!” she said. 

Mr. Ferguson, breathless, put his hand up to his cheek, 
as if the unwonted touch had left some soft, fresh warmth 
behind it. 

Elizabeth did not wait to see the pleased and 
startled gesture: she gathered up her fluffy tarlatan 
skirt, dashed out into the garden, through the green gate 
in the wall, and bursting into the house next door, stood 

56 


THfc IRON WOMAN 


in the hall and called up-stairs: ‘ ‘ David! Come! Hurry! 
Quick!’* She was stamping her foot with excitement. 

David, who had had a perspiring and angry quarter of 
an hour with his first white tie, came out of his room and 
looked over the banisters, both hands at his throat. 
“ Hello! What on earth is the matter ?” 

“David—see!” she said, and stood, quivering and 
radiant, all her whiteness billowing about her. 

“ See what ?” David said, patiently. 

“A long dress!” 

“A whatf” said David; then looking down at her, 
turning and twisting and preening herself in the dark hall 
like some shining white bird, he burst into a shout of 
laughter. 

Elizabeth’s face reddened. “ I don’t see anything to 
laugh at.” 

“You look like a little girl dressed up!” 

“Little girl? I don’t see much ‘little girl’ about it; 
I’m nearly sixteen.” She gathered her skirt over her 
arm again, and retreated with angry dignity. 

As for David, he went back to try a new tie; but his 
eyes were dreamy. “George! she’s a daisy,” he said to 
himself. 

When, the day before, Mrs. Richie had told her son 
that she had been invited to Blair’s party, he was de¬ 
lighted. David had learned several things at school be¬ 
sides his prayers, some of which caused Mrs. Richie, like 
most mothers of boys, to give much time to her prayers. 
But as a result, perhaps of prayers as well as of 
education, and in spite of Mr. Ferguson’s misgivings as 
to the wisdom of trusting a boy to a “good woman,” he 
was turning out an honest young cub, of few words, 
defective sense of humor, and rather clumsy manners. 
But under his speechlessness and awkwardness, David 
was sufficiently sophisticated to be immensely proud of 
his pretty mother; only a laborious sense of propriety 
and the shyness of his sex and years kept him from, as he 

57 


THE IRON WOMAN 


expressed it, “blowing about her.” He blew now, how¬ 
ever, a little, when she said she was going to the party: 
“Blair’ll be awfully set up to have you come. You 
know he’s terribly mashed on you. He thinks you are 
about the best thing going. Materna, now you dress up 
awfully, won’t you ? I want you to take the shine out of 
everybody else. I’m going to wear my dress suit,” he 
encouraged her. “Why, say!” he interrupted himself, 
“ that’s funny—Blair didn’t tell me he had asked you.” 

“Mrs. Maitland asked me.” 

“Mrs. Maitland!” David said, aghast; “Matema, you 
don’t suppose she's coming, do you?” 

“ I’m sure I hope so, considering she invited me.” 

“Great Caesar’s ghost!” said David, thoughtfully; and 
added, under his breath, “ I’m betting on his not expect¬ 
ing her. Poor Blair!” 

Blair had need of sympathy. His plan for a “ dinner” 
had encountered difficulties, and he had had moments 
of racking indecision; but when, on the toss of a 
penny, ‘ heads ’ declared for carrying the thing through, 
he held to his purpose with a perseverance that was 
amusingly like his mother’s large and unshakable ob¬ 
stinacies. He had endless talks with Harris as to food; 
and with painstaking regard for artistic effect and as 
far as he understood it, for convention, he worked out 
every detail of service and arrangement. His first 
effort was to make the room beautiful; so the crim¬ 
son curtains were drawn across the windows, and the 
cut-glass chandeliers in both rooms emerged glitter¬ 
ing from their brown paper-muslin bags. The table 
was rather overloaded with large pieces of silver which 
Blair had found in the big silver-chest in the garret; 
among them was a huge center ornament, called in 
those days an epergne — an extraordinary arrange¬ 
ment of prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which 
were supposed to be flowers. It was black with disuse, 
and Blair made Harris work over it until the poor fellow 

58 


THE IRON WOMAN 


protested that he had rubbed the skin off his thumb— 
but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled 
like diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old 
Harris so long as it required no sacrifice on his own part, 
but he did not relinquish a single piece of silver because of 
that thumb. With his large allowance, it was easy to 
put flowers everywhere—^the most expensive that the 
season afforded. When he ordered them, he bought at 
the same time a great bunch of orchids for Miss White. 
“I can’t invite her,” he decided, reluctantly; “but her 
feelings won’t be hurt if I send her some flowers.” As 
for the menu, he charged the things he wanted to his 
mother’s meager account at the grocery-store. When 
he produced his list of dehcacies, things unknown on 
that office-dining-room table, the amazed grocer said 
to himself, “Well, at last I guess that trade is going to 
amount to something! Why, damn it,” he confided 
to his bookkeeper afterward, “I been sendin’ things up 
to that there house for seventeen years, and the whole 
bill ain’t amounted to shucks. That woman could buy 
and sell me twenty times over. Twenty times? A 
hundred times I And I give you my word she eats like a 
day-laborer. Listen to this”—and he rattled off Blair’s 
order. “She’ll fall down dead when she sees them 
things; she don’t even know how to spell ’em!” 

Blair had never seen a table properly appointed for a 
dinner-party; but Harris had recollections of more 
elaborate and elegant days, a recollection, indeed, of one 
occasion when he had waited at a policemen’s ball; and he 
laid down the law so dogmatically that Blair assented to 
every suggestion. The result was a humorous compound 
of Harris’s standards and Blair’s aspirations; but the 
boy, coming in to look at the table before the arrival 
of his guests, was perfectly satisfied. 

“It’s fine, Harris, isn’t it?” he said. “Now, light 
up all the burners on both chandeliers. Harris, give a 
rub to that thistle leaf, will you? It’s sort of dull.” 

S9 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Harris looked at his swollen thumb. “Aw', now, Mr. 
Blair," he began. “Did you hear what I said?" Blair 
said, icily—and the leaf was polished! Blair looked 
at it critically, then laughed and tossed the old man a 
dollar. “There’s some sticking-plaster for you. And 
Harris, look here: those things—^the finger-bowls; don’t 
go and get mixed up on ’em, will you ? They come last." 
Harris put his thumb in his mouth; “ I never seen dishes 
like that," he mumbled doubtfully; “the police didn’t 
have ’em." 

“It’s the fashion," Blair explained; “Mrs. Richie has 
them, and I’ve seen them at swell hotels. Most people 
don’t eat in an office," he ended, with a curl of his hand¬ 
some lip. 

It was while he was fussing about, whistling or singing, 
altering the angle of a spoon here or the position of a 
wine-glass there, that his mother came in. She had put 
on her Sunday black silk, and she had even added a lace 
collar and a shell cameo pin; she was knitting busily, the 
ball of pink worsted tucked under one arm. There was a 
sort of grim amusement, tempered by patience, in her 
face. To have supper at seven o’clock, and call it “din¬ 
ner"; to load the table with more food than anybody 
could eat, and much of it stuff that didn’t give the stom¬ 
ach any honest work to do—“like that truck," she said, 
pointing an amused knitting-needle at the olives—was 
nonsense. But Blair was young; he would get over his 
foolishness when he got into business. Meantime, let 
him be foolish! “I suppose he thinks he’s the grand high 
cockalorum!" she told herself, chuckling. Aloud she said, 
with rough jocosity: 

“What in the world is the good of all those flowers? 
A supper table is a place for food, not fiddl^faddle!" 

Blair reddened sharply. “ There are people," he began, 
in that voice of restrained irritation which is Veiled by 
sarcastic politeness—“there are people, my dear mother, 
who think of something else than filling their stomachs." 

6o 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Mrs= Maitland’s eye had left the dinner table, and was 
taking her son from head to foot. He was very hand-* 
some, this sixteen-year-old boy, standing tall and grace¬ 
ful in his new clothes, which, indeed, he wore easily, in 
spite of his excitement at their newness. 

“Well!” she said, sweeping him with a glance. Her 
face glowed; “I wish his father could have lived to see 
him,” she thought; she put out her hand and touched his 
shoulder. “Turn round here till I look at you! Well, 
well! I suppose you’re enjoying those togs you’ve got 
on?” Her voice was suddenly raucous with pride; if she 
had known how, she would have kissed him. Instead 
she said, with loud cheerfulness: “Well, my son, which is 
the head of the table ? Where am I to sit ?” 

''Mother!** Blair said. He turned quite white. He 
went over to the improvised serving-table, and picked up 
a fork with a trembling hand; put it down again, and 
turned to look at her. Yes; she was all dressed up! He 
groaned under his breath. The tears actually stood in 
his eyes. “ I thought,” he said, and stopped to clear his 
voice, “I didn’t know—” 

“What’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Maitland asked, 
looking at him over her spectacles. 

“I didn’t suppose you would be willing to come,” 
Blair said, miserably. 

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said, kindly; “I’ll stick it out 
for an hour.” 

Blair ground his teeth. Harris, pulling on a very 
large pair of white cotton gloves—thus did he live up to 
the standards of the policemen’s ball—came shuffling 
across the hall, and his aghast expression when he caught 
sight of Mrs. Maitland was a faint consolation to the 
despairing boy. 

“Here! Harris! have you got places enough?” Mrs. 
Maitland said. “Blair, have you counted noses? Mrs. 
Richie’s coming, and Mr. Ferguson.” 

“Mrs. Richie!” In spite of his despair, Blair had an 

6i 


THE IRON WOMAN 


elated moment. He was devoted to David’s mother, 
and there was some consolation in the fact that she 
would see that he knew how to do things decently! 
Then his anger burst out. “I didn’t ask Mrs. Richie,” 
he said, his voice trembling. 

“What time is supper?” his mother interrupted, “I’m 
getting hungry!” She took her place at the head of the 
table, sitting a little sidewise, with one foot round the leg 
of her chair; she looked about impatiently, striking the 
table softly with her open hand—a hand always beautiful, 
and to-night clean. “ What nonsense to have it so late I” 

“It isn’t supper,” Blair said; “it’s dinner; and—” 
But at that moment the door-bell saved the situation. 
Harris, stumbling with agitation, had retreated to his 
pantry, so Mrs. Maitland motioned to Blair. “ Run and 
open the door for your friends,” she said, kindly. 

Blair did not “run,” but he went; and if he could have 
killed those first-comers with a glance, he would have 
done so. As for Mrs. Maitland, still glowing with this 
new experience of taking part in her son’s pleasure, she 
tramped into the front room to say how do you do and 
shake hands with two very shy young men, who were 
plainly awed by her presence. As the others came in, 
it was she who received them, standing on the hearth¬ 
rug, her back to the empty fireplace which Blair had filled 
with roses, all ready to welcome the timid youngsters, 
v/ho in reply to her loud greetings stammered the com¬ 
monplaces of the occasion. 

“How are you, Elizabeth? What! a long dress? 
Well, well, you are getting to be a big girl! How are you, 
David? And so you have a swallowtail, too? Glad to 
see you, Mrs. Richie. Who’s this ? Harry Knight ? Well, 
Harry, you are quite a big boy. I knew your stepmother 
when she was Molly Wharton, and not half your age.” 

Harry, who had a sense of humor, was able to laugh; 
but David was red with wrath, and Elizabeth tossed her 
head. As for Blair, he grew paler and paler. 

62 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Yet the dreadful dinner went oif fairly smoothly, 
Mrs. Maitland sat down before anybody else. “Come, 
good people, come!” she said, and began her rapid “ Bless, 
O Lord,” while the rest of the company were still draw¬ 
ing up their chairs. “Amen, soup, Mrs. Richie?” she 
said, heartily. The ladling out of the soup was an outlet 
for her energy; and as Harris’s ideals put all the dishes on 
the table at once, she w^as kept busy carving or helping, 
or, with the hospitable insistence of her generation, urg¬ 
ing her guests to eat. Blair sat at the other end of the 
table in black silence. Once he looked at Mrs. Richie 
with an agonized gratitude in his .beautiful eyes, like 
the gratitude of a hurt puppy lapping a friendly and 
helping hand; for Mrs. Richie, with the gentlest tact, 
tried to help him by ignoring him and talking to the 
young people about her. Elizabeth, too, endeavored to 
do her part by assuming (with furtive glances at David) 
a languid, young-lady-like manner, w^hich would have 
made Blair chuckle at any less terrible mom^ent. Even 
Mr. Ferguson, although still a little dazed by that encoun¬ 
ter with his niece, came to the rescue—for the situation 
was, of course, patent—and talked to Mrs. Maitland; 
which, poor Blair thought, “at least shut her up”! 

Mrs. Maitland was, of course perfectly unconscious 
that any one could wish to shut her up; she did not feel 
anything unusual in the atmosphere, and she was aston¬ 
ishingly patient with all the stuff and nonsense. Once 
she did strike the call-bell, which she had bidden Harris 
to bring from the office table, and say, loudly: “Make 
haste, Harris! Make haste! What is all this delay?” 
The delay was Harris’s agitated endeavor to refresh his 
memory about “them basins.” 

“Is it nowV he whispered to Blair, furtively rubbing 
his thumb on the shiny seam of his trousers. Blair, look¬ 
ing a little sick, whispered back; 

“Oh, throw ’em out of the window.” 

“Aw’, now, Mr. Blair,” poor Harris protested, ”1 

5 ^3 


THE IRON WOMAN 


clean forgot; is it with these here tomatoes, or with the 
dessert?” 

“Go to the devil!” Blair said, under his breath. And 
the finger-bowls appeared with the salad. 

“What’s this nonsense?” Mrs. Maitland demanded; 
then, realizing Blair’s effort, she picked up a finger-bowl 
and looked at it, cocking an amused eyebrow. “Well, 
Blair,” she said, with loud good nature, “we are putting 
on airs!” 

Blair pretended not to hear. For the whole of that 
appalling experience he had nothing to say—even to 
Elizabeth, sitting beside him in the new white dress, the 
spun silk of her brown hair shimmering in the amaz¬ 
ing glitter of the great cut-glass chandelier. The other 
young people, glancing with alarmed eyes now at Blair, 
and now at his mother, followed their host’s example of 
silence. Mrs. Maitland, however, did her duty as she 
saw it; she asked condescending questions as to “how 
you children amuse yourselves,” and she made her crude 
jokes at everybody’s expense, with side remarks to 
Robert Ferguson about their families: “That Knight 
boy is Molly Wharton’s stepson; he looks like his father. 
Old Knight is an elder in The First Church; he hands 
round the hat for other people to put their money in— 
never gives anything himself. I always call his wife 
‘goose Molly.’ ... Is that young Cla 5 rton, Tom Clayton’s 
son ? He looks as if he had some gumption; Tom was 
always Mr. Doestick’s friend. ... I suppose you know 
that that West boy’s grandmother wasn’t sure who his 
grandfather was? . . . Mrs. Richie’s a pretty woman, 
Friend Ferguson; where are your eyes!” . . . 

When it was over, that terrible thirty minutes—^for 
Mrs. Maitland drove Harris at full speed through all 
Blair’s elaborations—it was Mrs. Richie who came to the 
rescue. 

“Mrs. Maitland,” she said, “sha’n’t you and I and Mr. 
Ferguson go and talk in your room, and leave the young 

64 


THE IROr^ WOMAN 


people to amuse themselves?” And MrSo Maitland’s 
quick agreement showed how relieved she was to get 
through with all the “nonsense.” 

When their elders had left them, the “young people” 
drew a long breath and looked at one another. Nannie, 
almost in tears, tried to make some whispered explana¬ 
tion to Blair, but he turned his back on her. David, 
with a carefully blase air, said, “ Bully dinner, old man.” 
Blair gave him a look, and David subsided. When the 
guests began a chatter of relief, Blair still stood apart 
in burning silence. He wished he need never see or 
speak to any of them again. He hated them all; he 
hated— But he did not finish this, even in his thoughts. 

When the others had recovered their spirits, and 
Nannie had begun to play on the piano, and some¬ 
body had suggested that they should all sing—“And 
then let’s dance!” cried Elizabeth—Blair disappeared. 
Out in the hall, standing with clenched hands in the dim 
light, he said to himself he wished they would all clear 
out! “I am sick of the whole darned business; I wish 
they’d clear out!” 

It was there that Elizabeth found him. She had for¬ 
gotten her displeasure at David, and was wildly happy; 
but she had missed Blair, and had come, in a dancing 
whirl of excitement, to find him. “What are you doing? 
Come right back to the parlor!” 

Blair, turning, saw the smooth cheek, pink as the 
curve of a shell, the soft hair’s bronze sheen, the amber 
darkness of the happy eyes. “Oh, Elizabeth!” he said, 
and actually sobbed. 

“ Blair! What is the matter ?” 

“ It was disgusting, the whole thing.” 

'‘What was disgusting?” 

“That awful dinner—” 

“Awful? You are perfectly crazy! It was lovely! 
What are you talking about?” In her dismayed de¬ 
fense of her first social function, she put her hands 

6s 


THE IRON WOMAN 


on his arm and shook it. “Why! It is the first din¬ 
ner I ever went to in all my life; and look: six- 
button gloves! What do you think of that ? Uncle told 
Cherry-pie I could have whatever was proper, and I got 
these lovely gloves. They are awfully fashionable!” She 
pulled one glove up, not only to get its utmost length, 
but also to cover that scar which her fierce little teeth 
had made so long ago. “Oh, Blair, it really was a 
perfectly beautiful dinner,” she said, earnestly. 

She was so close to him that it seemed as if the color 
on her cheek burned against his, and he could smell the 
rose in her brown hair. “ Oh, Elizabeth,” he said, pant¬ 
ing, ‘ ‘ you are an angel 1’' 

“It was simply lovely!” she declared. In her excite¬ 
ment she did not notice that new word. Blair trembled; 
he could not speak. “Come right straight back!” 
Elizabeth said; “please! Everybody will have a per¬ 
fectly splendid time, if you’ll just come back. We want 
you to sing. Please!” The long, sweet comers of her 
eyes implored him. 

“Elizabeth,” Blair whispered, “ I—I love you.” 

Elizabeth caught her breath; then the exquisite color 
streamed over her face. “Oh!” she said faintly, and 
swerved away from him. Blair came a step nearer. 
They were both silent. Elizabeth put her hand over her 
lips, and stared at him with half-frightened eyes. Then 
Blair: 

“Do you care, a little, Elizabeth?” 

. “We must go back to the parlor,” she said, breathing 
quickly. 

“Elizabeth, do you?” 

“Oh—Blair!” 

“Please, Elizabeth,” Blair said; and putting his 
arms round her very gently, he kissed her cheek. 

Elizabeth looked at him speechlessly; then, with a 
lovely movement, came nestling against him. A minute 
later they drew apart; the girl’s face was quivering with 

66 


THE IRON WOMAN 


light and mystery, the young man’s face was amazed. 
Then amazement changed to triumph, and triumph to 
power, and power to something else, something that 
made Elizabeth shrink and utter a little cry. In an 
instant he caught her violently to him and kissed her— 
kissed the scar on her upraised, fending arm, then her 
neck, her eyes, her mouth, holding her so that she cried 
out and struggled; and as he let her go, she burst out 
crying. “Oh—oh— oh —’’ she said; and darting from 
him, ran up - stairs, stumbling on the unaccustomed 
length of her skir t and catching at the banisters to keep 
from falling. But at the head of the stairs she paused; 
the tears had burned off in flashing excitement. She 
hesitated; it seemed as if she would turn and come back 
to him. But when he made a motion to bound up after 
her, she smiled and fled, and he heard the door of Nan¬ 
nie’s room bang and the key turn in the lock. 

Blair Maitland stood looking after her; in that one hot 
instant boyishness had been swept out of his face. 


CHAPTER V 


“They have all suddenly grown up!” Mrs. Richie said, 
disconsolately. She had left the “ party” early, without 
waiting for her carriage, because Mrs. Maitland’s impa¬ 
tient glances at her desk had been an unmistakable 
dismissal. 

“ I will walk home with you,” Robert Ferguson said. 

“Aren’t you going to wait for Elizabeth?” 

“ David will bring her home.” 

“ He’ll be only too glad of the chance; how pretty she 
was to-night! You must have been very proud of her.” 

“ Not in the least. Beauty isn’t a thing to be proud of. 
Quite the contrary.” 

Mrs. Richie laughed: “You are hopeless, Mr. Fergu¬ 
son! What is a girl for, if not to be sweet and pretty 
and charming? And Elizabeth is all three.” 

“ I would rather have her good.” 

“But prettiness doesn’t interfere with goodness! And 
Elizabeth is a dear, good child.” 

“ I hope she is,” he said 

“You know she is,” she declared. 

“Well, she has her good points,” he admitted; and put 
his hand up to his lean cheek as if he still felt the flower¬ 
like touch of Elizabeth’s lips. 

“ But they have all grown up,” Mrs. Richie said. “ Mr. 
Ferguson, David wants to smoke! What shall I do?” 

“Good heavens! hasn’t he smoked by this time?” said 
Robert Ferguson, horrified. “You’ll ruin that boy 
yet!” 

“Oh, when he was a little boy, there was one awfu! 

68 




THE IRON WOMAN 


clay-, when—Mrs. Richie shuddered at the remem* 
brance “but now he wants to really smoke, you know.** 
“He’s seventeen,** Mr. Ferguson said, severely “I 
should think you might cut the apron-strings by this 
time.*' 

“You seem very anxious about apron-strings foi 
David,*' she retorted with some spirits “I notice you 
never show any anxiety about Blair.“ 

At which her landlord laughed loudly : “1 should 
say not! He's been brought up by a man—practically/'* 
Then he added with some generosity, “ But I'm not sure 
thait an apron-string or two migh: not have been a good 
thing for Blair,** 

Mrs. Richie accepted the amend good-naturedly, “ My 
tall David is very nice, even if he does want to smcke^ 
But I've lost my boy.** 

“He’ll be a boy,** Robert Ferguson said, “until he 
makes an ass of himself by falling in love. Then, in one 
minute, he’ll turn into a man. I—“ he paused, and 
laughed: “ I was twenty, just out of college, when I made 
an ass of myself over a girl who was as vain as a peacock. 
Well, she was beautiful; I admit that.** 

“You were very young,*’ Mrs. Richie said gravely; 
the emotion behind his careless words was obvious. 
They walked along in silence for several minutes. Then 
he said, contemptuously: 

“She threw me over. Good riddance, of coursed* 

“ If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it 
was well to have her do so—^in time,” she agreed; “but I 
suppose those things cut deep with a boy,** she added 
gently. She had a maternal instinct to put out a com¬ 
forting hand, and say “never mind.” Poor man! be¬ 
cause, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was 
still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an 
armor of surliness. “Won't you come in?” she said, 
when they reached her door; she smiled at him, with her 
pleasant leaf-brown eyes,—eyes which were less sad. he 

6g) 


THE IRON WOMAN 


thought, than when she first came to Mercer, (“ Getting 
over her husband’s death, I suppose,” he said to himself. 
“Well, she has looked mournful longer than most 
widov/s!”) 

He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting 
down on her little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. 
He began to bite off the end absently, then remembered 
to say, “May 1 smoke?” 

The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white 
lilies. Mr, Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies 
against the southern wall of Mrs. Richie’s garden. “ Such 
things are attractive to tenants; I find it improves my 
property,” he had explained to her, when she found him 
grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He looked now, 
approvingly at the jug of lilies that had replaced the grate 
in the fireplace, but Mrs. Richie looked at the clock. 
She was tired, and sometimes her good neighbor stayed 
very late. 

“Poor Blair!” she said, “I’m afraid his dinner was 
rather a disappointment. What charming manners he 
has,” she added, meditatively; “I think it is very re^ 
markable, considering—” 

Mr. Ferguson knocked off his glasses. “Mrs. Mait¬ 
land’s manners may not be as—as fine-ladyish as some 
people’s, I grant you,” he said, “but I can tell you, she 
has more brains in her little finger than—” 

“Than I have in my whole body?” Mrs. Richie inter¬ 
rupted gc ily; “ I know just what you were going to say.” 

“No, 1 wasn’t,” he defended himself; but he laughed 
and stepped barking. 

“It is what you thought,” she said; “but let me tell 
you, I admire Mrs. Maitland just as much as you do.” 

“No, you don’t, because you can’t,” he said crossly; 
but he smiled. He could not help forgiving Mrs. 
Richie, even when she did not seem to appreciate Mrs. 
Maitland—the one subject on which the two neighbors 
fell out. But after the smile he sighed, and apparently 

70 


THt IRON WOMAN 


forgot Mrs. Maitland. He scratched a match, held it 
absently until it scorched his fingers; blew it out, and 
tossed it into the lilies; Mrs. Richie winced, but Mr. 
Ferguson did not notice her; he leaned forward, his 
hands between his knees, the unlighted cigar in his fingers: 
“Yes; she threw me over.“ 

For a wild moment Mrs. Richie thought he meant Mrs. 
Maitland, then she remembered. “ It was very hard for 
you,“ she said vaguely. 

“ And Elizabeth’s mother,” he went on, “my brother 
Arthur’s wife, left him. He never got over the despair of 
it. He—killed himself,” 

Mrs, Richie’s vagueness was all gone. “Mr. Fer¬ 
guson!” 

“She was bad—all through.” 

“Oh, no!” Helena Richie said faintly. 

“She left him, for another man. Just as the girl I 
believed in left me. I would have doubted my God, Mrs, 
Richie, before I could have doubted that girl. And when 
she jilted me, I suppose I did doubt Him for a while. At 
any rate, I doubted everybody else. I do still, more or 
less.” 

Mrs. Richie was silent. 

“We two brothers—^the same thing happened to both 
of us! It was worse for him than for me; I escaped, as 
you might say, and I learned a valuable lesson; I have 
never built on anybody. Life doesn’t play the same 
trick on me twice. But Arthur was different. He was 
of softer stuff. You’d have liked my brother Arthur. 
Yes; he was too good to her—^that was the trouble. If 
he had beaten her once or twice, I don’t believe she would 
have behaved as she did. Imagine leaving a good hus¬ 
band, a devoted husband—” 

“What I can’t imagine,” Helena Richie said, in a low 
voice, “is leaving a living child. That seems to me 
impossible.” 

“The man married her after Arthur—died,” he went 

71 


THE IRON WOMAN 


on; “I guess she paid the piper in her life with him? 
I hope she did. Oh, well; she’s dead now; I mustn’t 
talk about her. But EHzabeth has her blood in her; 
and she is pretty, just as she was. She looks like 
her, sometimes. There — now you know. Now you 
understand why I worry so about her. I used to 
wish she would die before she grew up, I tried to 
do my duty to her, but I hoped she would die. Yet 
she seems to be a good little thing. Yes, I’m pretty 
sure she is a good little thing. To-night, before we went 
to the dinner, she—she behaved very prettily. But if I 
saw her mother in her, I would—God knows what I would 
do! But except for this fussing about clothes, she seems 
all right. You know she wanted a locket once? But 
you think that is only natural to a girl? Not a vanity 
that I need to be anxious about ? Her mother was vain 
—a shallow, selfish theatrical creature!” He looked at 
her with worried eyes. “ I am dreadfully anxious, some¬ 
times,” he said simply. 

“There’s nothing to be anxious about,” she said, in a 
smothered voice, “nothing at all.” 

“Of course I’m fond of her,” he confessed, “but I am 
never sure of her.” 

“ You ought to be sure of her,’“ Mrs. Richie said; “her 
little vanities—why, it is just natural for a girl to want 
pretty dresses! But to think— Poor little Elizabeth!” 
She hid her face in her hands; “and poor bad mother,” 
she said, in a whisper. 

“Don’t pity her! She was not the one to pity. It 
was Arthur who—” He left the sentence unfinished; 
his face quivered. 

“ Oh,” she cried, “ you are all wrong. She is the one to 
pity, I don’t care how selfish and shallow she was! As 
for your brother, he just died. What was dying, com¬ 
pared to living? Oh, you don’t understand. Poor bad 
women! You might at least be sorry for them. How 
can you be so hard ?” 

72 


THE IRON WOMAN 


'‘I suppose I am hard,” he said, half wonderingly, but 
very meekly; “when a good woman can pity Dora—^that 
was her name; who am I to judge her ? I’ll try not to be 
so hard,” he promised. 

He had risen. Mrs. Richie tried to speak, but stopped 
and caught her breath at the bang of the front door. 

“It’s David!” she said, in a terrified voice. Her face 
was very pale, so pale that David, coming abruptly into 
the room, stood still in his tracks, aghast. 

“Why, Maternal What’s up? Mother, something is 
the matter!” 

“ It’s my fault, David,” Robert Ferguson said, abashed. 
“ I was telling your mother a—a sad story. Mrs. Richie, 
I didn’t realize it would pain you. Your mother is a very 
kind woman, David; she’s been sympathizing with other 
people’s troubles.” 

David, looking at him resentfully, came and stood 
beside her, with an aggressively protecting manner. “I 
don’t see why she need bother about other people’s 
troubles. Say, Matema, I—I wouldn’t feel badly. Mr. 
Ferguson, I—^you—” he blustered; he was very much 
perturbed. 

The fact was David was not in an amiable humor; 
Elizabeth had been very queer all the way home. “ High 
and mighty!” David said to himself; treating him as if he 
were a little boy, and she a young lady! “ And I’m seven¬ 
teen—^the idea of her putting on such airs!” And now 
here was her uncle making his mother low-spirited, 
“Matema, I wouldn’t bother,” he comforted her. 

Mrs. Richie put a soothing hand on his arm. “ Never 
mind,” she said; she was still pale. “Yes, it was a 
sad story. But I thank you for telling me, Mr. Fer- 
guson.” 

He tried awkwardly to apologize for having distressed 
her, and then took himself off. When he opened his own 
door, even before he closed it again, he called out, “ Miss 
White I” 


72 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Yes, sir?” said the little governess, peering rabbit¬ 
like from the parlor. 

“Miss White, I’ve been thinking; I’m going to buy 
Elizabeth a piece of jewelry; a locket, I think. You can 
tell her so. Mrs. Richie says she’s quite sure she isn’t 
really vain in wanting such things.” 

“ I have been at my post, sir, since Elizabeth was three 
years old,” Miss White said with spirit, “and I have 
frequently told you that she was not vain. I’ll go and 
tell her what you say, immejetly!” 

But when Cherry-pie went to carry the great news she 
found Elizabeth’s door locked. 

“What? Uncle is going to give me a locket?” Eliza¬ 
beth called out in answer to her knock. “Oh, joy! 
Splendid!” 

“ Let me in, and I’ll tell you what he said,” Miss White 
called back. 

“No! I can’t!” cried the joyous young voice. “I’m 
busy!” 

She was busy; she was holding a lamp above her head, 
and looking at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. 
Her hair was down, tumbling in a shining mass over her 
shoulders, her eyes were like stars, her cheeks rose-red. 
She was turning her white neck from side to side, throw¬ 
ing her head backward, looking at herself through half¬ 
shut eyes; her mouth was scarlet. “ Blair is in love with 
me!” she said to herself. She felt his last kiss still on 
her mouth; she felt it until it seemed as if her lip bled. 

“David Richie needn’t talk about ‘little girls’ any 
more. Fm engaged!'' She put the lamp down on the 
mantelpiece, shook her mane of hair back over her bare 
shoulders, and then, her hands on her hips, her short 
petticoat luffling about her knees, she began to dance. 
“ Somebody is in love with me 1 

* Oh, isn’t it joyful, joyful, joyful— ’ *’ 


CHAPTER VI 


When the company had gone,—“ I thought they nevew 
would goT’ Nannie said—she rushed at her brothefo 
“ Blair 

The boy flung up his head proudly. “She told you, 
did sh(‘?’* 

“ You’re engaged!” cried Nannie, ecstatically, 

Blair started. “Why!” he said. “So I am! I never 
thought of it.” And when he got his breath, the radiant 
darkness of his eyes sparkled into laughter. “Yes, Fm 
engaged!'^ He put his hands into his pockets and strut¬ 
ted the length of the room; a minute later he stopped 
beside the piano and struck a triumphant chord; then 
he sat down and began to play uproariously, singing to 
a crashing accompaniment; 

. , . . lived a miner, a forty-niner. 

With his daughter Clementine! 

Oh my darling, oh my daWiwg— 

—the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound over¬ 
flowing through the long rooms, across the hall, even into 
the dining-room. Harris, wiping dishes in the pantry, 
stopped, tea-towel in hand, and listened; Sarah Mait¬ 
land, at her desk, lifted her head, and the pen slipped 
from her fingers. Blair, spinning around on the piano- 
stool, caught his sister about her v/aist in a hug that 
made her squeak. Then they both shrieked mth laugh¬ 
ter. 

“But Blair!” Nannie said, getting her breath; “.shall 
you tell Mamma to-night ?” 


75 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Blair's face dropped. “I guess I won't tell anybody 
yet,” he faltered; “oh, that awful dinner 1'* 

As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon 
him, he added to the fear of telling his mother a resent¬ 
ment that would retaliate by secrecy. “ I won’t tell her 
at all,” he decided; ‘‘and don’t you, either.” 

“11” said Nannie. “Well, I should think not. 
Gracious!” 

But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not 
keep the great news to himself; he saw David the next 
afternoon, and overflowed. 

David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been 
suddenly hit below the belt; then in a low voice he said, 
“You —kissed her. Did she kiss you?” 

Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a 
little from side to side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes 
shone. He was standing with his feet well apart, his 
hands deep in his pockets; he laughed, reddening to 
his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once 
David’s old look of silent, friendly admiration did not 
answer him; instead there was half-bewildered dismay. 
David wanted to protest that it wasn’t—well, it wasn’t 
fair. He did not say it; and in not saying it he ceased 
to be a boy. 

“I suppose it was when you and she went off after 
dinner? You needn’t have been so darned quiet about 
it! What's the good of being so—^mum about every¬ 
thing? Why didn’t you come back and tell? You’re 
not ashamed of it, are you ?” 

“ A man doesn’t tell a thing like that,” Blair said scorn¬ 
fully. 

“Well!”' David snorted, “I suppose some time you'll 
be married?” 

Blair nodded again. “ Right off.” 

“Huh!” said David; “your mother won't let yoi?. 
You are only sixteen. Don’t be an ass,” 

“I’ll be seventeen next May." 

76 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near 
eighteen, and I haven’t thought of being married;—^at 
least to anybody in particular." 

“You couldn’t," Blair said coldly; “you haven't got 
the cash." 

David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, 
“ I thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. 
You didn’t talk to each other at all, I thought you were 
both huffy; and instead of that—" David paused, 

“That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love- 
affair for his grievance. Blair’s toga virilis, assumed in 
that hot moment in the hall, was profanity of sorts, 
“ David, I’m going to clear out. I can’t stand this sort of 
thing. I’ll go and live at a hotel till I go to college; 
I’ll—" 

“Thought you were going to get married?" David in¬ 
terrupted him viciously. 

Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,—David 
was jealous! “Gorry!" he said blankly. He was hon¬ 
estly dismayed. “ Look here," he began, “ I didn’t know 
that you —" 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about," David 
broke in contemptuously; “if you think / care, one way 
or the other, you’re mistaken. It’s nothing to me. 
*By "; and he turned on his heel. 

It was a hot July afcemoon; the sun-baked street along 
which they had been walking was deep with black dust 
and full of the clamor of traffic. Four big gray Flemish 
horses, straining against their breastplates, were hauling 
a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the sound, 
familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at 
that moment intolerable. “I’ll get out of this cursed 
noise," he said to himself, and turned down a narrow 
street toward the river. It occurred to him that he 
would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and 
get a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd’s. Then he 
would strike out into the country and take a walk; he 
77 


THE IRON WOMAN 


had nothing else to do. This vacation business wasn’t 
all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at 
school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow. 

He had reached Mrs. Todd’s saloon by that time, and 
through the white palings of the fence he had glimpses of 
happy couples sitting at marble-topped tables among the 
marigolds and coreopsis, taking slow, delicious spoonfuls 
of ice-cream, and gazing at each other with languishing 
eyes. David felt a qualm of disgust; for the first time in 
his life he had no desire for ice-cream. A boy like Blair 
might find it pleasant to eat ice-cream with a lot of 
fellows and girls out in the garden of a toll-house, with 
people looking in through the palings; but he had out¬ 
grown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking 
about being in love! Blair didn’t know what love meant. 
And as for Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with 
Blair? He was two months younger than she, to begin 
with. “ No woman ought to marry a man younger than 
she is,” David said; he himself, he reflected, was much 
older than Elizabeth. That was how it ought to be. 
The girl should always be younger than the fellow. And 
anyway, Blair wasn’t the kind of man for a girl like Eliza¬ 
beth to marry. ” He wouldn’t understand her. Eliza¬ 
beth goes off at half-cock sometimes, and Blair w^ouldn’t 
know how to handle her. I understand her, perfectly. 
Besides that, he’s too selfish. A woman ought not to 
marry a selfish man,” said David. However, it made no 
difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked 
that sort of thing, if she found Blair—who was only a 
baby anyhow—^the kind of man she could love, why 
then he was disappointed in Elizabeth. That was all. 
He was not jealous, or anything like that; he was just 
disappointed; he was sorry that Elizabeth was that kind 
of girl. “Very, very sorry,” David said to himself; and 
his eyes stung. . . . (Ah, well; one may smile; but the 
pangs are real enough to the calf I The trouble with us is 
we have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) . . 

78 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Yes, David was sorry; but the whole darned business was 
nothing to him, because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, 
and he could not waste time over women; he had his 
future to think of. In fact, he felt that to make the 
most of himself he must never marry. 

Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He 
had come upon some boys who were throwing stones at 
the dust-grimed windows of an unused foundry shed. 
Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated and 
deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a 
target for every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass 
lay in splinters on the slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, 
and one could look in through yawning holes at silent, 
shadowy spaces that had once roared with light from 
swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few 
whole panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, 
David, being a human boy, stopped and looked on, at 
first with his hands in his pockets; then he picked up a 
stone himself. A minute later he was yelling and smash¬ 
ing with the rest of them; but when he had broken a 
couple of lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he felt a 
sudden distaste for breaking windows,—^and for every¬ 
thing else! It was a sort of spiritual nausea, and life was 
black and bitter on his tongue. He was conscious of an 
actual sinking below his breast-bone. “Fm probably 
coming down with brain fever,” he told himself; and he 
had a happy moment of thinking how wretched every¬ 
body would be when he died. Elizabeth would be very 
wretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the im¬ 
pulse of expected death, he turned to ward home again.... 
However, if he should by any chance recover, marriage 
was not for him. It occurred to him that this would be a 
bitter surprise to Elizabeth, whose engagement would of 
course be broken as soon as she heard of his illness; and 
again he felt happier. No, he would never marry. He 
would give his life to his profession—it had long ago been 
decided that David was to be a doctor. But it would be 

79 


6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a lon^lv life. He looked ahead and saw himself a great 
physician—no common doctor, like that old Doctor 
King who came sometimes to see his mother; but a great 
man, dying nobly in some awful epidemic. When Eliz¬ 
abeth heard of his magnificent courage, she’d feel pretty 
badly. Rather different from Blair. How much finer than 
to be merely looking forward to a lot of money that some¬ 
body else had made! But perhaps that was why Eliza^ 
beth liked Blair; because he was going to have money ? 
And yet, how could she compare Blair with,—well, any 
fellow who meant to work his own way? Here David 
touched bottom abruptly. “How can a fellow take 
money he hasn’t earned?” he said to himself. David’s 
feeling about independence was unusual in a boy 
of his years, and it was not altogether admirable; it 
was, in fact, one of those qualities that is a virtue, 
unless it becomes a vice. 

When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to 
look down at the slow, turbid river rolling below him. 
He stood there a long time, leaning on the hand-rail. On 
the dun surface a sheen of oil gathered, and spread, and 
gathered again. He could hear the wash of the current, 
and in the railing under his hand he felt the old wooden 
structure thrill and quiver in the constant surge of water 
against the pier below him. The sun, a blood-red disk, 
was slipping into the deepening haze, and on either side of 
the river the city was darkening into dusk. All along 
the shore lights were pricking out of the twilight and 
sending wavering shafts down into the water. The coil¬ 
ing smoke from furnace chimneys lay level and almost 
motionless in the still air; sometimes it was shot with 
sparks, or showed, on its bellying black curves, red 
gleams from hidden fires below. 

David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes,, 
stopped his miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat 
coming down the current. Its smoke-stacks were folded 
back for passing under the bridge, and its great paddle- 

80 


THE IRuN WOMAN 


wheel scarcely moved except to get steerageway. It 
was pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together into a 
spreading sheet. The smell of the fresh planks pierced 
the acrid odor of soot that was settling down with 
the night mists. On one of the rafts was a shanty 
of newly sawed pine boards; it had no windows, but 
it was evidently a home, for a stove - pipe came 
through its roof, and there was a woman sitting in 
its little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking 
down, saw the downy head, and a little crumpled fist 
lying on the white, bare breast. The woman, looking up 
as they floated below him, caught his eye, and drew her 
blue cotton dress across her bosom. David suddenly 
put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The 
abrupt tears were on his cheeks. “Oh— ElizabethT* he 
said. The revolt, the anger, the jealousy, were all gone. 
He sobbed under his breath. He had forgotten that he 
had said it made no difference to him,—“not the slightest 
difference.” It did make a difference! All the differ¬ 
ence in the world. . . . “Oh, Elizabeth!” . . . The 
barges had slid farther and farther under the bridge; the 
woman and the child were out of sight; the steamboat 
with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a 
wake of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly 
against the piers. It was nearly dark there on the foot¬ 
path, and quite deserted. David put his head down on 
his arms on the railing and stood motionless for a long 
moment. 

When he reached home, he found his mother in the 
twilight, in the little garden behind the house. David, 
standing behind her, said carelessly, “I have some news 
for you, Materna.” 

“ Yes ?” she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon 
verbena. 

“Blair is—is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, Fll snip 
that thing for you.” 

Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. “ What! Why, 

8i 


THE IRON WOMAN 


but they are both children, and—she stopped, and 
looked at him. “ Oh —David she said. 

And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the 
opposite houses, dropped his head on her shoulder. 
“Matema^Matema,'* he said, in a stifled voice> 


CHAPTER Vri 


Nobody except David cook -.he childish love-affaij 
very seriously, not aven cne principals—especially not 
Elizabeth. . . . 

David did not see her for ? lay or two, except out 
of the corner of his eye when, during the new and 
still secret rite of shaving—^tor David was willing to 
shed his blood to prove that he was a man—he looked 
out of his bedroom window and saw her down in the 
garden helping her uncle feed his pigeons. He did not 
want to see her. He was younger than his years, this 
honest-eyed, inexpressive fellow bf seventeen, but for all 
his youth he was hard hit. He grew abruptly older that 
first week; he didn’t sleep well; he even looked a little 
pale under his freckles, and his mother worried over his 
appetite. When she asked him what was the matter, he 
said, listlessly, “Nothing.” They were very intimate 
friends these two, but that moment on the bridge marked 
the beginning of the period—known to all mothers of 
sons—of the boy’s temporary retreat into himself. . . . 
When a day or two later David saw Elizabeth, or rather 
when she, picking a bunch of heliotrope in her garden, 
saw him through the open door in the wall, and called to 
him to come “right over! as fast as your legs can carry 
you!”—he was, she thought, “very queer.” He came 
in answer to the summons, but he had nothing to 
say. She, however, was bubbling over with talk. She 
took his hand, and, running with him into the arbor, 
pulled him down on the seat beside her. 

“David! Where on earth have you been ali this 
time? David, have you heard?” 

83 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ I suppose you mean—^about you and Blair ?” he said 
He did not look at her, but he watched a pencil of sun¬ 
shine, piercing the leaves overhead, faintly gilding the 
bunches of green grapes that had a film of soot on their 
greenness, and then creeping down to rest on the helio¬ 
trope in her lap. 

“Yes!” said Elizabeth. “Isn’t it the most exciting 
thing you ever heard ? David, I want to shov/ you some¬ 
thing.” She peered out through the leaves to make sure 
that they were unobserved. “It’s a terrific secret!” she 
said, her eyes dancing. Her fingers were at her throat, 
fumbling with the fastening of her dress, which caught, 
and had to be pulled open with a jerk, then she drew 
half-way from her young bosom a ring hanging on a black 
silk thread. She bent forward a little, so that he might 
see it. “I keep it down in there so Cherry-pie won’t 
know,” she whispered. **Look!'* 

David looked—^and looked away. 

Elizabeth, with a blissful sigh, dropped the ring back 
again into the warm whiteness of that secret place. 
“Isn’t it perfectly lovely? It’s my engagement ring! 
I’m so excited!” 

David was silent. 

“ Why, David Richie! You don’t care a bit!” 

“Why, yes, I do,” he said. He took a grape from a 
bunch beside him, rubbed the soot off on his trousers, 
and ate it; then blinked wryly. “Gorry, that’s sour.” 

“You—don’t—^like—my engagement!” Elizabeth de¬ 
clared slowly. Reproachful tears stood in her eyes; she 
fastened her dress with indignant fingers. “ I think you 
are perfectly horrid not to be sympathetic. It’s very 
important to a girl to get engaged and have a ring.” 

“ It’s very pretty,” David managed to say. 

“Pretty? I should say it was pretty! It cost fifty 
dollars! Blair said so. David, what on earth is the 
matter! Don’t you like me being engaged?” 

“Oh, it’s all right,” he evaded. He shut his eves, 
84 


THE IRON WOMAN 


which were still watering from that sour grape, but even 
with closed eyes he saw again that soft place where 
Blair’s ring hung, warm and secret; the pain below” his 
own breast-bone was very bad for a minute, and the hot 
fragrance of the heliotrope seemed overpowering. He 
swallowed hard, then looked at one of Mr. Ferguson’s 
pigeons, walking almost into the arbor. The pigeon 
stopped, hesitated, cocked a ruby eye on the two humans 
on the wooden seat, and fluttered back into the sunny 
garden. 

“Why, you mindF' Elizabeth said, aghast. 

“Oh, it’s nothing to me,” David managed to say; 
“course, I don’t care. Only 1 didn’t know you liked 
Blair so much; so it was a—a surprise,” he said miser¬ 
ably. 

Elizabeth’s consternation w^as beyond words. There 
was a perceptible moment before she could find any¬ 
thing to say. “Why, I never dreamed you’d mind! 
David, truly, I like you best of any boy I know;—only, of 
course now, being engaged to Blair, I have to like him 
best?” 

“ Yes that’s so,” David admitted. 

“ Truly, I like you dreadfully, David. If I’d supposed 
you’d mind— But, oh, David, it’s so interesting to be 
engaged. I really can’t stop. I’d have to give him 
back my ring!” she said in an agonized voice. She 
pressed her hand against her breast, and poor David’s 
eyes followed the ardent gesture. 

“ It’s all right,” he said with a gulp, 

Elizabeth was ready to cry, she dropped her head on 
his shoulder and began to bemoan herself. “Why on 
earth didn’t you say something? How could I know? 
How stupid you are, David! If I’d known you minded, 
I’d just as lief have been engaged to—” Elizabeth 
stopped short. She sat up very straight, and put her 
hand to the neck of her dress to make sure it was fastened. 
At that moment a new sense was bom in her; for the first 

8s 


THE IRON WOMAN 


time since they had known each other, her straightfor* 
ward eyes—the sexless eyes of a child—faltered, and 
refused to meet David’s. “I think maybe Cherry-pie 
wants me now,” she said shyly, and slipped away, leaving 
David mournfully eating green grapes in the arbor. 
This was the last time that Elizabeth, uninvited, put her 
head on a boy’s shoulder. 

A week later she confided to Miss White the great fact 
of her engagement; but she was not so excited about it 
by that time. For one thing, she had received her 
uncle’s present of a locket, so the ring was not her only 
piece of jewelry; and besides that, since her talk with 
David, being “engaged” had seemed less interesting. 
However, Miss White felt it her duty to drop a hint of 
what had happened to Mr. Ferguson: had it struck him 
that perhaps Blair Maitland was—was thinking about 
Elizabeth ? 

“ Thinking what about her?” Mr. Ferguson said, lifting 
his head from his papers with a fretted look. 

“Why,” said Miss White, “as I am always at my 
post, sir, I have opportunities for observing; in fact, I 
shouldn’t wonder if they were—^attached.” Cherry-pie 
would have felt that a more definite word was indelicate. 
“Of course I don’t exactly know it,” said Miss White, 
faithful to Elizabeth’s confidence, “but I recall that 
when I was a young lady, young gentlemen did become 
attached—to other young ladies.” 

“Love-making? At her age? I won’t have it!” said 
Robert Ferguson. The old, apprehensive look dark¬ 
ened in his face; his feeling for the child was so strangely 
shadowed by his fear that “ Life would play another trick 
on him,” and Elizabeth would disappoint him some 
way, that he could not take Cherry-pie’s information 
with any appreciation of its humor. “Send her to 
me,” he said. 

“Mr. Ferguson,” poor old Miss White ventured, “if I 
might suggest, it would be well to be very kind, because—” 

86 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Kind?” said Robert Ferguson, astonished; he gave 
an angry thrust at the black ribbon of his glasses that 
brought them tumbling from his nose. “Was I ever 
unkind ? I will see her in the library after supper.” 

Miss White nibbled at him speechlessly. “If he is 
severe with her, I don’t know what she won't do!” she 
said to herself. 

But Mr. Ferguson did not mean to be severe. When 
Elizabeth presented herself in his library, the interview 
began calmly enough. Her uncle was brief and to the 
point, but he was not unkind. She and PHlr were too 
young to be engaged,—“Don’t think of it again,” he 
commanded. 

Elizabeth looked tearful, but she did not resent his 
dictum;—David’s lack of sympathy had been very 
dampening to romance. It was just at the end that the 
gunpowder flared. 

“Now, remember, I don’t want you to be foolish, 
Elizabeth.” 

“ I don’t think being in love is foolish. Uncle.” 

“Love! What do you know about love? You are 
nothing but a silly little girl.” 

“I don’t think I’m very little; and Blair is in love 
with me.” 

“ Blair is as young and as foolish as you are. Even if 
you were older, I wouldn’t allow it. He is selfish and 
irresponsible, and—” 

“I think,” interrupted Elizabeth, “that you are very 
mean to abuse Blair behind his back. It isn’t fair.” 
Her uncle was perfectly dumfounded; then he broke 
into harsh reproof. Elizabeth grew whiter and whiter; 
the dimple in her cheek lengthened into a long, hard line: 
“ I wish I didn’t live with you. I wish my mother was 
alive. She would be good to me!” 

“Your mother?” said Robert Ferguson; his invol¬ 
untary grunt of cynical amusement touched the chil4 
like a whip. Her fuiy was appalling. She screamed 

87 


THE IRON WOMAN 


at him that she hated him! She loved her mother! 
She was going to marry Blair the minute she was grown 
up! Then she whirled out of the room, almost knock¬ 
ing over poor old Miss White, whose “post” had been 
anxiously near the key-hole. 

Up - stairs, her rage scared her governess nearly to 
death: “My lamb! You’ll get overheated, and take 
cold. When I was a young lady, it was thought un¬ 
refined to speak so — emphatically. And yoiur dear 
uncle didn’t mean to be severe; he—” 

“‘Dear Uncle’?” said Elizabeth, “dear devil! He 
hurt my feelings. He made fun of my mother!” As 
she spoke, she leaped at a photograph of Robert 
Ferguson which stood on her bureau, and, doubling her 
hand, struck the thin glass with all her force. It 
splintered, and the blood spurted from her cut knuckles 
on to her uncle’s face. 

Miss White began to cry. “Oh, my dear, my dear, 
try to control yourself, or you’ll do something dreadful 
some day!” Cherry-pie’s efforts to check Elizabeth’s 
temper were like the protesting twitterings of a sparrow 
in a thunder-storm. When she reproved her now, the 
furious little creature, wincing and trying to check the 
bleeding with her handkerchief, did not even take the 
trouble to reply. Later, of course, the inevitable moment 
of penitence came; but it was not because she had lost her 
temper; loss of temper was always a trifling matter to 
Elizabeth; it was because she had been disrespectful to 
her uncle’s picture. That night, when all the household 
was in bed, she shpped down-stairs, candle in hand, to the 
library. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of her¬ 
self; she took it out of the frame, tore it into little bits, 
stamped on it, grinding her heel down on her own young 
face; then she took off the locket Mr. Ferguson had given 
her,—a most simple affair of pearls and turquoise; kissed 
it with passion, and looked about her: where should 
it be offered up? The ashes in the fireplace? No; the 

88 


THE IRON WOMAN 


house-maid would find it there. Then she had an in* 
spiration—^the deep well of her uncle’s battered old ink- 
stand ! Oh, to blacken the pearls, to stain the heavenly 
blue of the turquoise! It was almost too frightful. But 
it was right. She had hurt his feelings by saying she 
wished she didn’t have to live with him, and she had 
insulted his dear, dear, dear picture! So, with a tear¬ 
ful hiccup, she dropped the locket into the ink-pot that 
stood between the feet of a spattered bronze Socrates, 
and watched it sink into a black and terrible grave. 
“I’m glad not to have it,” she said, and felt that she 
had squared matters with her conscience. 

As for Robert Ferguson, 'he did not notice that the 
photograph had disappeared, nor did he plunge his pen 
deep enough to find a pearl, nor understand the signifi¬ 
cance of the bound-up hand, but the old worry about her 
came back again. Her mother had defended her own 
wicked love-affair, with all the violence of a selfish wom¬ 
an; and in his panic of apprehension, poor little Eliza¬ 
beth’s defense of Blair seemed to be of the same nature. 
He was so worried over it that he was moved to do a very 
unwise thing. He would, he said to himself, put Mrs. 
Maitland on her guard about this nonsense between the 
two children. 

The next morning when he went into her office at the 
Works, he found the place humming with business. As 
he entered he met a foreman, just taking his departure 
with, so to speak, his tail between his legs. The man was 
scarlet to his forehead under the lash of his employer’s 
tongue. It had been administered in the inner room; 
but the door was open into the large office, and as Mrs. 
Maitland had not seen fit to modulate her voice, the 
clerks and some messenger-boys and a couple of travel¬ 
ing-men had had the benefit of it. Ferguson, reporting 
at that open door, was bidden curtly to come in and sit 
down. “ I’ll see you presently,’* she said, and burst out 
into the large office, 

89 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Instantly the roomful of people, lounging about wait¬ 
ing their turn, came to attention. She rushed in among 
them like a gale, whirling away the straws and chaff 
before her, and leaving only the things that were worth 
while. She snapped a yellow envelope from a boy’s 
hand, and even while she was ripping it open with a big 
forefinger, she was reading the card of an astonished trav¬ 
eling-man: “No, sir; no, sir; your bid was one-half of 
one per cent, over Heintz. Your people been customers 
so long that they thought that I—? I never mix busi¬ 
ness and friendship!’’ She stood still long enough to run 
her eye over the drawing of a patent, and toss it back to 
the would-be inventor. “ No, I don’t care to take it up 
with you. Cast it for you? Certainly. I’ll cast any¬ 
thing for anybody”; and the man found his blue¬ 
print in his hand before he could begin his explanation. 
“What? Johnson wants to know where to get the new 
housing to replace the one that broke yesterday? Tell 
Johnson that’s what I pay him to decide. I have no 
time to do his business for him—my own is all I can 
attend to! Mr. Ferguson!” she called out, as she came 
banging back into the private office, “what about that 
ore that came in yesterday?” She sat down at her desk 
and listened intently to a somewhat intricate statement 
involving manufacturing matters dependent upon the 
quality of certain shipments of ore. Then, abruptly 
she gave her orders. 

Robert Ferguson, making notes as rapidly as he could, 
smiled with satisfaction at the power of it all. It was as 
ruthless and as admirable as a force of nature. She 
would not pause, this woman, for flesh and blood; she 
was as impersonal as one of her own great shears that 
would bite off a “bloom” or a man’s head with equal pre¬ 
cision, and in doing so would be fulfilling the law of its 
being. Assuredly she would stop Blair’s puppy-love in 
short order! 

Business over, Sarah Maitland leaned back in her chair 
90 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and laughed. “Did you hear me blo\\dng Dale up? 1 
guess he’ll stay put for a while now! But I’m afraid I 
was angry,” she confessed sheepishly; “and there is 
nothing on earth so foolish as to be angry at a fool.” 

“There is nothing on earth so irritating as a fool,” he 
said. 

“Yes, but it’s absurd to waste your temper on ’em. 
I always say to myself, ‘ Sarah Maitland, if he had your 
brains, he’d have your job.’ That generally keeps me 
cool; but I’m afraid I shall never learn to suffer Mr. 
Doestick’s friends, gladly. Read your Bible, and you’ll 
know where that comes from! I tell you, friend Fer¬ 
guson, you ought to thank God every day that you 
weren’t bom a fool; and so ought I. Well what can I 
do for you?” 

“I am bothered about Elizabeth and Blair.” 

She looked at him blankly for a moment. “Eliza¬ 
beth? Blair? What about Elizabeth and Blair?” 

“It appears,” Robert Ferguson said, and shoved the 
door shut with his foot, “it appears that there has been 
some love-making.” 

“Love-making?” she repeated, bewildered. 

“Blair has been talking to Elizabeth,” he explained. 
“ I believe they call themselves engaged.” 

Mrs. Maitland flung her head back with a loud laugh. 
At the shock of such a sound in such a place, one of the 
clerks in the other room spun round on his stool, and 
Mrs. Maitland, catching sight of him through the glass 
partition, broke the laugh off in the middle. “Well, 
upon my word!” she said. 

“Of course it’s all nonsense, but it must be stopped.” 

“ Why ?” said Mrs. Maitland. And her superintendent 
felt a jar of astonishment. 

“They are children.” 

“Blair is sixteen,” his mother said thoughtfully; “if 
he thinks he is in love with Elizabeth, it will help to make 
a man of him. Furthermore, I’d rather have him make 

QI 


THE IRON WOMAN 


love than make pictures;—^that is his last fancy,” she 
said, frowning. “I, don't know how he comes by it. Of 
course, my husband did paint sometimes, I admit; but 
he never wanted to make a business of it. He was no 
fool, I can tell you, if he did make pictures!” 

Robert Ferguson said dryly that he didn’t think she 
need worry about Blair. ‘ ‘ He has neither industry nor hu¬ 
mility,” he said, “and you can’t be an artist without both 
of ’em. But as for this love business, they are children!” 

Mrs. Maitland was not listening. “To be in love will 
be steadying him while he’s at college. If he sticks to 
Elizabeth till he graduates, I sha’n’t object.” 

“I shall object.” 

But she did not notice his protest. 

“She has more temper than is quite comfortable,” 
she ruminated; “but, after all, to a young man being 
engaged is like having a dog; one dog does as well as 
another; one girl does as well as another. And it isn’t 
as if Blair had to consider whether his wife would be a 
‘good manager,’ as they say; he’ll have enough to waste, 
if he wants to. He’ll have more than he knows what to 
do with!” There was a little proud bridling of her head. 
She, who had never wasted a cent in her life, had made it 
possible for her boy to be as wasteful as he pleased. 
“Yes,” she said, with the quick decision which was so 
characteristic of her, “yes, he can have her.” 

“No, he can’t,” said Elizabeth’s uncle. 

“What?” she said, in frank surprise. 

“ Blair will have too much money. Inherited wealth 
is the biggest handicap a man can have.” 

“Too much money?” she chuckled; “your bearings 
are getting hot, ain’t they? Come, come! I’m not so 
sure you need thank God. Flow can a man have too 
much money? That’s nonsense!” She banged her 
hand down on the call-bell on her desk. “Evans! 
Bring me the drawings for those channels.” 

“ I tell you I won’t have it,” Robert Ferguson repeated. 

9a 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I mean the blue-prints!” Mrs. Maitland commanded 
loudly; “you have no sense, Evans!” Ferguson got up; 
she had a way of not hearing when she was spoken to that 
made a man hot along his backbone. Robert Ferguson 
was hot, but he meant to have the last word; he paused 
at the door and looked back. 

” I shall not allow * 

“Good-day, Mr. Ferguson,*' said his employer, deer' in 
^he blue-print&. 


CHAPTER VIP 


Elizabeth’s uncle need not have concerned himselt so 
seriously about the affairs of Elizabeth’s heart. The 
very next day the rift between the lovers began: 

“What on earth have you done to your hand?” asked 
Blair. 

“ I cut it. I was angry at Uncle, and broke his picture, 
and—” 

Blair shouted with laughter. “Oh, Elizabeth, what a 
goose you are! That’s just the way you used to bite your 
arm when you were mad. You always did cut off your 
nose to spite your face! Where is your locket ?” 

“ None of your business!” said Elizabeth savagely. It 
was easy to be savage with Blair, because David’s lack of 
interest in her affairs had taken the zest out of “being 
engaged” in the most surprising way. But she had no 
intention of not being engaged! Romance was too 
flattering to self-love to be relinquished; nevertheless, 
after the first week or two she lapsed easily, in moments 
of forgetfulness, into the old matter-of-fact squabbling 
and the healthy unreasonableness natural to lifelong 
acquaintance. The only difference was that now, when 
she and Blair squabbled, they made up again in new ways; 
Blair, with gusts of what Elizabeth, annoyed and a little 
disgusted, called “silliness”; Elizabeth, with strange, 
half-scared, wholly joyous moments of conscious power. 
But the “making-up” was far less personal than the 
fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual antag¬ 
onisms, whereas the reconciliations were something larger 
than the girl and boy—something which bore them on 

94 


THE IRON WOMAN 


its current as a river bears straws upon its breast. But 
they played with that mighty current as thoughtlessly as 
all young creatures play with it. Elizabeth used to take 
her engagement ring from the silk thread about her neck, 
and, putting it on. her finger, dance up and down her 
room, her right hand on her hip, her left stretched out 
before her so that she could see the sparkle of the tiny 
diamond on her third finger. I’m engaged!” she would 
sing to herself. 

“ ‘ Oh, isn’t it joyful, joyful, joyful!’ 

Blair’s in love with me!” The words were so glorious 
that she rarely remembered to add, ‘‘I’m in love with 
Blair.” The fact was, Blair was merely a necessary 
appendage to the joy of being engaged. When he irri¬ 
tated her by what she called “silliness,” she was often 
frankly disagreeable to him. 

As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He 
swaggered, and threw his shoulders back, and cast ap¬ 
praising eyes on women generally, and thought deeply 
on marriage. But of Elizabeth he thought very little. 
Because she was a girl, she bored him quite as often as he 
bored her. It was because she was a woman that there 
came those moments when he offended her; and in those 
moments she had but little personality to him. In fact, 
their love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart from 
its elemental impulses which they did not understand, 
was as much of a play to them as the apple-tree house¬ 
keeping had been. 

So Mr. Ferguson might have spared himself the un¬ 
pleasant interview with Blair’s mother. He recognized 
this himself before long, and was even able to relax 
into a difficult smile when Mrs. Richie ventured a mild 
pleasantry on the subject. For Mrs. Richie had spoken 
to Blair, and understood the situation so well that she 
could venture a pleasantry. She had sounded him 
one evening in the darkness of her narrow garden, 


THE IRON WOMAN 


David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance 
to wait for him—so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge 
on the grass at her feet. His adoration of David’s 
mother, begun in his childhood, had strengthened with 
his years; perhaps because she was all that his own 
mother was not. 

“Blair,” she said, “of course you and I both realize 
that Elizabeth is only a child, and you are entirely too 
wise to talk seriously about being engaged to her. She 
is far too young for that sort of thing. Of course you 
understand that ?” 

And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood 
had been laid on his shoulder, and instantly forgetting 
the smaller pride of being “engaged,” said in a very 
mature voice, “Oh, certainly I understand.” 

If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance 
of white stocks blossoming near the stone bench that 
circled the old havi:hom-tree in the middle of the gar¬ 
den—if at that moment Mrs. Richie had demanded 
Elizabeth’s head upon a charger, Blair would have 
rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman 
was far too wise to wring any promise from the boy, 
although, indeed, she had no opportunity, for at that 
moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door be¬ 
tween the two gardens and asked if he might come in 
and smoke his cigar in his neighbor’s garden. “I’ll 
smoke the aphids off your rose-bushes,” he offered. 
“You are very careless about your roses!” 

“A ‘bad tenant’?” said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And 
poor Blair picked himself up, and went sulkily off. 

But Mrs. Richie’s flattering assumption that Blair 
and she looked at things in the same way, and David’s 
apparent indifference to Elizabeth’s emotions, made 
the childish love-affair wholesomely commonplace on 
both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the 
prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that 
the moment of parting would not be tragic to EHzabeth. 

96 


THE IRON WOMAN 


The romance did not come to a recognized end, how¬ 
ever, until a day or two before Blair started East. The 
four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. 
Todd’s, where David had stood treat, and after their 
tumblers of pink and brown and white ice-cream had 
been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke 
about “good-looking couples,” they had taken two skiffs 
for a slow drift down the river to Willis’s. 

When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first 
kept abreast, but gradually, in spite of Miss White’s 
desire to be “at her post,” and David’s entire willing¬ 
ness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth appropriately 
fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which Eliza¬ 
beth had lately acquired, to play propriet}?". In the 
yellow September afternoon the river ran placidly be¬ 
tween the hills and low-l 3 dng meadows; here and 
there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple flamed among 
the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the 
chestnuts showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. 
Ahead of them the sunshine had melted into an umber 
haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened into a 
smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left , hand 
about to get different lights on her ring, which she had 
managed to slip on her finger when Cherry-pie was not 
looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was singing under 
his breath: 

“ ‘ Oh! I came to a river, an’ I couldn’t get across* 

Sing “ Polly-wolly-doodle ” all the day! 

An’ I jumped upon a nigger, an’ I thought he was a hoss; 
Sing Polly-wolly—’ 

“Horrid old hole, Mercer,” he broke off, resting on 
his oars and letting the boat slip back on the current. 

“I like Mercer!” Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the 
ring. “Since you’ve come home from boarding-school 
you don’t like anything but the East.” She began to 
stroke her puppy’s head violently. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Blair was silent; he was looking at a willow dipping 
Its swaying finger-tips in the water. 

“Blair! why don’t you answer me?’' 

Blair, plainly bored, said, “Well, I don’t like hideous¬ 
ness and dirt.” 

“David likes Mercer.” 

“I bet Mrs. Richie doesn’t,” Blair murmured, and 
began to row lazily. 

“Oh, Mrs. Richie!” cried Elizabeth; “you think 
whatever she thinks is about perfect.” 

“Well, isn’t it?” 

Elizabeth’s lip hardened. “I suppose you think she's 
perfect too?” 

“I do,” Blair said. 

“She thinks I’m dreadful because, sometimes, I— 
get provoked,” Elizabeth said angrily. 

“Well, you are,” Blair agreed calmly. 

“ If I am so wicked, I wonder you want to be engaged 
to me!” 

“Can’t I like anybody but you?” Blair said, and 
yawned. 

“You can like everybody, for all I care,” she retorted. 
Blair whistled, upon which Elizabeth became absorbed 
in petting her dog, kissing him ardently between his 
eyes. 

“ I hate to see a girl kiss a dog,” Blair observed; 

“ ‘ Sing Polly-wolly-doo—’ ** 

“Don’t look, then,” said Elizabeth, and kissed Bobby 
again. 

Blair sighed, and gave up his song. Bobby, obvi¬ 
ously uncomfortable, scrambled out of Elizabeth’s lap 
and began to stretch himself on the uncertain floor of 
the skiff. 

“Lie down!” Blair commanded, and poked the little 
creature, not ungently, with his foot. Bobby yelped, 
gave a flying nip at his ankle, and retreated to the 

o8 


THE IRON WOMAN 


shelter of his mistress’s skirts. “Confound that dog!” 
cried Blair. 

“ You are a horrid boy!” she said, consoling hei puppy 
with frantic caresses. “I’m glad he bit you!” 

Blair, rubbing his ankle, said he’d like to throw the 
little wretch overboard. 

Well, of course, Elizabeth being Elizabeth, the result 
was inevitable. The next instant the ring lay sparkling 
in the bottom of the boat. “I break my engagement! 
Take your old ring! You are a cruel, wicked boy, and 
I hate you—so there!” 

“ I must say I don’t see why you should expect me to 
enjoy being bitten,” Blair said hotly. “Well, all right; 
throw me over, if you want to. I shall never trust a 
woman again as long as I live!” He began to row 
fiercely. “I only hope that darned pup isn’t going 
mad.” 

“I hope he is going mad,” said Elizabeth, trembling 
all over, “and I hope you’ll go mad, too. Put me on 
shore this instant!” 

“Considering the current, I fear you will have to 
endure my society for several instants,” Blair said. 

“I’d rather be drowned!” she cried furiously, and as 
she spoke, even before he could raise his hand to stop 
her, with Bobby in her arms she sprang lightly over the 
side of the boat into the water. There was a terrific 
splash—^but, alas! Elizabeth, in preferring death to 
Blair’s society, had not calculated upon the September 
shallows, and even before the horrified boy could drop 
his oars and spring to her assistance, she was on her 
feet, standing knee-deep in the muddy current. 

The water completely extinguished the fires of wrath. 
In the hubbub that followed, the ejaculations and out¬ 
cries, Nannie’s tears. Miss White’s terrified scolding, 
Blair’s protestations to David that it wasn’t his fault- 
through it all, Elizabeth, wading ashore, was silent. 
Only at the landing of the toll-house, when poor dis- 

99 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tracted Cherry-pie bade the boys get a carriage, did 
she speak: 

“ I won’t go in a carriage. I am going to walk home.’* 

“My lamb! you’ll take cold! You mustn’t!’’ 

“You look like the deuce,’’ Blair told her anxiously; 
and David blurted out, “Elizabeth, you can’t walk 
home; you’re a perfect object!” Elizabeth, through 
the mud trickling over her eyes, flashed a look at him: 

''That's why I’m going to walk!” And walk she 
did—across the bridge, along the street, a dripping little 
figure stared at by passers-by, and followed by the faith¬ 
ful but embarrassed four—^by five, indeed, for Blair had 
fished Bobby out of the water, and even stopped, once in 
a while when no one was looking, to give the maker of all 
this trouble a furtive and apologetic pat. At Eliza¬ 
beth’s door, in a very scared frame of mind lest Mr. 
Ferguson should come out and catch him, Blair at¬ 
tempted to apologize. 

“Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said, muddy and shiver¬ 
ing, but just; “it wasn’t your fault. But we’re not 
engaged any more.” And that was the end of the love- 
story! 

Elizabeth told Cherry-pie that she had “broken 
with Blair Maitland forever!'* Miss White, when she 
went to make her report of the dreadful event to Mr. 
Ferguson, added that she felt assured the young peo¬ 
ple had got over their foolishness. Elizabeth’s uncle, 
telling the story of the ducking to David’s horrified 
mother, said that he was greatly relieved to know that 
Elizabeth had come to her senses. 

But with all the “tellings” that buzzed between the 
three households, nobody thought of telling Mrs. Mait¬ 
land. Why should theyWho would connect this woman 
of iron and toil and sweat, of noise and motion, with the 
sentimentalities of two children.? She had to find it out 
ior herself. 

At breakfast on the morning of the day Blair was to 

lOO 


THE IRON WOMAN 


start East, his mother, looking over the top of her news¬ 
paper at him, said abruptly: 

“ Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. 
Be at my office at the Works at ten-fifteen.” She looked 
at him amiably, then pushed back her chair. “Nannie! 
Get my bonnet. Come! Hurry! I’m late!” 

Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of 
rusty black crepe, with strings frayed with many ty- 
ings. “Oh, Mamma,” she said softly, “do let me get 
you a new bonnet?” 

But Mrs. Maitland was not listening. “Harris!” 
she called loudly, “tell Watson to have those roller 
figures for me at eleven. And I want the linen tracing—• 
Bates will know what I mean—at noon without fail. 
Nannie, see that there’s boiled cabbage for dinner.” 

A moment later the door banged behind her. The 
abrupt silence was like a blow. Nannie and Harris 
caught their breaths; it was as if the oxygen had been 
sucked out of the air; there was a minute before any 
one breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a 
wordless protest; he actually winced with pain. He 
glanced around the unlovely room; at the table, with its 
ledgers and clutter of unmatched china—old Canton, 
and heavy white earthernware, and odd cups and saucers 
with splashing decorations which had pleased Harris’s 
eye; at the files of newspapers on the sideboard, the 
grimy walls, the untidy fireplace. “ Thank Heaven! 
I’m going off to-day. I wish I need never come 
back,” he said. 

“Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say!” 

“It may be dreadful, but that’s the way I feel. I 
can’t help my feelings, can I ? The further mother and 
I are apart, the better we love each other. Well! I 
suppose I’ve got to go and see her bossing a lot of men, 
instead of sitting at home, like a lady;—and I’ll get a 
dreadful blowing up. Of course she knows about the 
engagement now, thanks to Elizabeth’s craziness.” 

lOI 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ I don’t believe she knows anything about it,” Nannie 
tried to encourage him. 

“Oh, you bet old Ferguson has told her,” Blair said, 
gloomily. “Say, Nannie, if Elizabeth doesn’t look out 
she’ll get into awful hot water one of these days with 
her devil of a temper—and she’ll get other people into it, 
too,’’ he ended resentfully. Blair hated hot -water, as he 
hated everything that was unbeautiful. “Mother is 
going to take my head off, of course,’’ he said. 

But Sarah Maitland, entirely ignorant of what had 
happened, had no such intention; she had gone over to 
her office in a glow of personal pleasure that warmed 
up the details of business. She intended to take Blair 
that morning through the Works,—^not as he had often 
gone before, tagging after her, a frightened child, a 
reluctant boy—^but as the prince, formally looking over 
the kingdom into which he was so soon to come! He was 
in love: therefore he would wish to be married; there¬ 
fore he would be impatient to get to work! It was 
all a matter of logical and satisfactory deduction. How 
many times in this hot summer, when very literally 
she was earning her son’s bread by the sweat of her 
brow, had she looked at Elizabeth and Blair, and found 
enjoyment in these deductions! Nobody would have 
imagined it, but the big, ungainly woman dreamed! 
Dreamed of her boy, of his business success, of his love, 
of his wife,—and, who knows? perhaps those grimy 
pink baby socks began to mean something more personal 
than the missionary barrel. It was her purpose, on 
this particular morning, to tell him, after they had gone 
through the Works, just where, when he graduated, he 
was to begin. Not at the bottom!—that was Fergu¬ 
son’s idea. “He ought to start at the bottom, if he is 
ever to get to the top,” Ferguson had barked. No, 
Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begin 
pretty well up at the top; and he should have a salary. 
What an incentive that would be! First she would 


102 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tell him that now, when he was going to college, she 
meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell 
him about the salary he would have when he got to work. 
How happy he would be! For a boy to be in love, and 
have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great busi¬ 
ness to look forward to; to have work—work 1 the finest 
thing in the world!—^all ready to his hand,—what more 
could a human being desire? At the office, she swept 
through the morning business with a speed that took 
her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced at 
the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. “He’ll get 
that knocked out of him when he gets into business,” 
she thought, grimly. 

It was eleven before he came loitering across the 
Yards. His mother, lifting her head for a moment 
from her desk, and glancing impatiently out of the dirt- 
begrimed office window, saw him coming, and caught 
the gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a 
puddle just outside the door. “Well, Master Blair,” 
she said to herself, flinging down her pen, “you’ll forget 
those pretty boots when you get to walking around your 
Works!” 

Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his 
way to her sanctum, and sat down in a chair beside her 
desk. He glanced at her shrinkingly, and looked away. 
Her bonnet was crooked; her hair was hanging in wisps 
at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed the big, 
broad-soled foot twisted round the leg of her chair. 
Blair saw the muddy sole of that shoe, and half closed 
his eyes. Then remembering Elizabeth, he felt a little 
sick; “she’s going to row about it!” he thought, and 
quailed. 

“You’re late,” she said; then, without stopping for 
his excuses, she proceeded with the business in hand. 
“I’m going to increase your allowance.” 

Blair sat up in astonishment. 

“I mean while you’re at college. After that I shall 
103 


THE IRON WOMAN 


stop the allowance entirely, and you will go to work. 
You will go on a salary, like any other man.” Her 
mouth clicked shut in a tight line of satisfaction. 

The color flew into Blair’s face. “Why!” he said. 
“You are awfully good. Mother. Really, I—” 

“ I know all about this business of your engagement 
to Elizabeth,” Mrs. Maitland broke in, “though you 
didn’t see fit to tell me about it yourself.” There was 
something in her voice that would have betiayed her 
to any other hearer; but Blair, who was sensitive to 
Mrs. Richie’s slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry- 
pie’s comfort, and generously thoughtful even of Harris 
—Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions, heard no 
pain in his mother’s voice. “I know all about it,” 
Mrs. Maitland went on. “I won’t have you call your¬ 
selves engaged until you are out of college, of course. 
But I have no objection to your looking forward to 
being engaged, and married, too. It’s a good thing for 
a young man to expect to be married; keeps him clean.” 

Blair w^as struck dumb. Evidently, though she did 
not know what had happcmed, she did know that he 
had been engaged. Yet she was not going to take 
his head off! Instead she was going to increase his 
allowance because, apparently, she approved of him! 

“So I want to tell you,” she went on, “though you 
have not seen fit to tell me anything, that I’m willing 
you should marry Elizabeth, as soon as you can support 
her. And you can do that as soon as you graduate, 
because, as I say, when you are in the Works, I shall 
pay you”—her iron face lighted—“I shall pay you 
a salary! a good salary.” 

More money! Blair laughed with satisfaction; the 
prospect soothed the sting of Elizabeth’s “meanness”— 
which was what he called it, when he did not remember to 
name it, darkly, “faithlessness.” He was so comforted 
that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to 
confide in his mother; “Elizabeth got provoked at me ” 
104 


THE IRON WOMAN 

—^there was a boyish demand for sympathy in his tone; 
“and—” 

But Mrs. Maitland interrupted him. “Come along,” 
she said, chuckling. She got up, pulled her bonnet 
straight, and gave her son a jocose thrust in the ribs that 
made him jump. “I can’t waste time over lovers’ 
quarrels. Patch it up! patch it up! You can afford 
to, you know, before you get married. You’ll get your 
innings later, my boy!” Still chuckling at her own joke, 
she slammed down the top of her desk and tramped 
into the outer office. 

Blair turned scarlet with anger. The personal famil¬ 
iarity extinguished his little friendly impulse to blurt 
out his trouble with Elizabeth, as completely as a gust 
of wind puts out a scarcely lighted candle. He got up, 
his teeth set, his hands clenched in his pockets, and 
followed his mother through the Yards—vast, hideous 
wastes, scorching in the September heats, full of end¬ 
less rows of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it seemed to 
Blair, of slag. The screeching clamor of the place reeked 
with the smell of rust and rubbish and sour earth, and 
the air was vibrant with the clatter of the “buggies” 
on the narrow-gauge tracks that ran in a tangled net¬ 
work from one furnace to another. Blair, trudging 
along behind his mother, cringing at the ugliness of 
everything about him, did not dare to speak; he still 
felt that dig in the ribs, and was so angry he could not 
have controlled his voice. 

Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as 
some women walk through a garden:—lovingly. She 
talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so; there was 
such and such a department; in that new shed she 
meant to put the draftsmen; over there the time¬ 
keeper;—she paused. Blair had left her, and was stand¬ 
ing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching, breath¬ 
lessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of 
liquid metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse 

105 


THE IRON WOMAN 


with the shifting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething 
and bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flashing film 
over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the 
black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points 
of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms 
under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the lurching 
dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and 
with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a 
mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abrupt¬ 
ly extinguished by the intolerable glare of light. 

“Oh,” Blair said breathlessly, “how wonderful!” 

“It is wonderful,” his mother said. “Thomas, here, 
can move the lever that tips the ladle with his two fingers 
—and out comes the iron as neatly as cream out of a 
jug!" 

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnifi¬ 
cence of light, and in the glowing torsos of the molders, 
planted as they were against the profound shadows of 
the foundry, that when she said, “Come on!” he did 
not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands 
on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; 
she was intensely gratified by his interest. “If his 
father had only lived to see him!” she said to herself. 
In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuck¬ 
ling, to the molder at her elbow: 

“ He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn’t he, Jim?” 
“And,” said Jim, telling the story afterward, “I allowed 
I’d never seen a young feller as knowing about castings 
as him. She took it down straight. You can’t pile it 
on too thick for a woman, about her young hin/* 

bomebody ought to paint it,” Blair said, under his 
breath. 

Mrs. Maitland’s face glowed; she came and stood 
beside him a moment in silence, resting her big, dirty 
hand on his shoulder. Then she said, half sheepishly, 
I call that ladle the ‘cradle of civilization.’ Think 
what’s inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New 
io6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


York and San Francisco together, and engines and 
machines for the whole world; there are telegraph wires 
that will bring—think of all the kinds of news they will 
bring, Blair,—wars, and births of babies! There are 
bridges in it, and pens that may write—well, maybe 
love-letters,” she said, with sly and climisy humor, “or 
even write, perhaps, the liberty of a race, as Lincoln’s 
pen wrote it. Yes!” she said, her face full of luminous 
abstraction, “the cradle of civilization!” 

He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult 
of exploding metal and the hammering and crashing in 
the adjacent mill; but when she said that, he looked 
round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a 
familiar face where he has supposed he would see a 
stranger. He forgot his shame in having a mother 
who ran an iron-mill; he even forgot that impudent 
thrust in the ribs; a spark of sympathy leaped between 
them as real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the 
molten iron sputtering over their heads. “Yes,” he 
said, “it’s all that, and it is magnificent, too!” 

“Come on!” she said, with a proud look. Over her 
shoulder she flung back at him figures and statistics; 
she told him of the tons of bridge materials on the books; 
the rail contract she had just taken was a big thing, 
very big! “We’ve never handled such an order, but we 
can do it!” 

They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the 
furnaces; Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, 
talking to puddlers, all the while bending and twisting 
between her strong fingers, with their blackened nails, a 
curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, while 
she considered some piece of work, then blowing the 
crumbs of iron out from between her lips and bursting 
into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among 
her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling ouc 
over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and 
gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she 
107 


THE IRON WOMAN 


was self-conscious — Blair was looking on! listening! 
thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be 
doing just what she was doing! For the moment she 
was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy ex¬ 
citement paused. She stood still, flinching and wincing, 
and putting a hand up to her eye. 

“ Ach!” she said; “a filing!” she looked with the other 
sympathetically watering eye at her son. ‘‘Here, take 
this thing out.” 

“/f” Blair said, dismayed. ‘‘Oh, I might hurt you.” 
Then, in his helplessness and concern—for, ignorant as 
he was, he knew enough .of the Works to know that an 
iron filing in your eye is no joke—he turned, with a 
flurried gesture, to one of the molders. ‘‘ Get a doctor, 
can’t you? Don’t stand there staring!” 

“Doctor?” said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son 
a look, and laughed. “He’s afraid he’ll hurt me!” she 
said, with a warm joyousness in her voice; “Jim, got a 
jack-knife? Just dig this thing out.” Jim came, dirty 
and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emer¬ 
gency of the Works. With a black thumb and fore¬ 
finger he raised the wincing lid, and with the pointed 
blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and precision, 
the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. “ ’Bliged,” 
Mrs. Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy hand¬ 
kerchief over the poor red eye, and turned to Blair. 
“Come on!” she said, and struck him on the shoulder so 
heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened 
by the molder’s greasy fingers, and so smeared with 
tears from the still watering eye that he could not bear 
to look at it. He hesitated, then offered her his hand¬ 
kerchief, which at least had the advantage of being 
clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, 
and laughed; then she dabbed her eye with it. “I 
guess I’ll have to put some of that cologne of yours on 
this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with the 
calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me 
108 


THE IRON WOMAN 


when you were a little fellow? Fve never had anything 
of my own fine enough to use the stuff on!” 

When they got back to the office again she was very 
brief and business-like with him. She had had a fine 
morning, but she couldn’t waste any more time! “ You 
can keep all this that you have seen in your mind. I 
don’t know just where I shall put you. If 5 ^ou have a 
preference, express it.” Then she told him what his 
salary would be when he got to work, and what allow¬ 
ance he was to have for the present. 

“Now, clear out, clear out!” she said; “good-by”; 
and turned her cheek toward him for their semi-annual 
parting. Blair, v/ith his eyes shut, kissed her. 

“Good-by, Mother. It has been awfully interesting. 
And I am awfully obliged to you about the allowance.” 
On the threshold of the office he halted. “Mother,” 
he said,—^and his voice was generous even to wistfulness'; 
“Mother, that cradle thing was stunning.” 

Mrs. Maitland nodded proudly; when he had gone, 
she folded his handkerchief up, and with a queer, shy 
gesture, slipped it into the bosom of her dress. Then 
she rang her bell. “Ask Mr. Ferguson to step here.” 
When her superintendent took the chair beside her desk, 
she was all business; but when business v/as over and 
he got up, she stopped him: “Tell the bookkeeper to 
double Blair’s allowance, beginning to-day.” 

Ferguson made a memorandum. 

“And Mr. Ferguson, I have told Blair that I con¬ 
sent to his engagement with Elizabeth, and I shall make 
it possible for them to be married as soon as he gradu¬ 
ates—” 

“But—” 

“I do this,” she went on, her satisfaction warm 
in her voice, “because I think he needs the incentive 
that comes to a young man when he wants to get married. 
It is natural and proper. And I will see that things 
are right for them.” 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“In the first place,” said Robert Ferguson, “I would 
not permit Elizabeth to marry Blair; but fortunately 
we need not discuss that. They have quarreled, and 
there is no longer any question of such a thing.” 

“Quarreled! but only this morning, not an hour 
ago, he let me suppose—” She paused. “Well, Fm 
sorry.” She paused again, and made aimless marks 
with her pen on the blotter. “That’s all this morning, 
Mr. Ferguson.” And though he lingered to tell her, 
with grim amusement, of Elizabeth’s angry bath, she 
made no further comment. 

When he had left the office she got up and shut the 
door. Then she went back to her chair, and leaning an 
elbow on her desk, covered her lips with her hand. After 
she had sat thus for nearly ten minutes, she suddenly 
rang for an office-boy. “Take this handkerchief up to 
the house to my son,” she said; “he forgot it.” 


CHAPTER IX 


For the next five or :ix years Blair was not otten at 
home. At the end of his freshman year he was con¬ 
ditioned, and found a tutor and the seashore and his 
sketching—for he painted with some enthusiasm just at 
that time—much more attractive than his mother and 
Mercer. After that he went to Europe in the long 
vacations. 

“How much vacation have I had since I began to run 
his business for him?’' his mother said once in answer 
to' Nannie’s intercession that he might be allowed to 
travel. But she let him go. She did not know how to 
do anything else* she always let him do what he pleased, 
and have what Ke wanted; she gave him ever 3 rthing, and 
she exacted no equivalent, either in scholarship or con¬ 
duct. It never occurred to her to make him appreciate 
his privileges by paying for them, and so, of course, 
she pauperized him. 

“ Blair likes Europe,” she said one Sunday afternoon 
to David Richie, who had come in to see Nannie, “but 
as for me, I wouldn’t tajce an hour of my good time, or 
spend a dollar of my good money, to see the best of their 
cathedrals and statues and things. Do you mean to 
say there is a cathedral in the world as handsome as 
my new foundry?” 

“Well,” David said modestly. “I haven’t seen any 
cathedrals, you know, Mrs. Maitland,” 

“It’s small loss to you, David,” she said kindly. “But 
I wish I’d thought to invite you to go along with Blair 
last summer. You might have liked it, though you are 
a pretty sensible fellow in most things ” 

8 IJI 


THE IRON WOMAN 


‘^Oh, I can’t go to Europe till I can earn enough to 
pay my own way,” David replied, and added with a 
quick look at Nannie, besides, I like being in Mercer.” 

“Blair has no need to earn money,” said Mrs. Mait¬ 
land carelessly; then she blew out her lips in a bubbling 
sigh. “And he would rather see a cathedral than his 
mother.” 

The pathos of that pricked even the pleasant egotism 
of youth; David winced, and Nannie tried to murmur 
something of her brother’s needing the rest. 

Mrs. Maitland gave her gnmt of amusement. “ Rest! 
What’s he ever done to tire him? Well! Clear out, clear 
out, you two,—if you’re going to take a walk. I’m 
glad you came back for your vacation, David, at any 
rate, Nannie needs shaking up. She sticks at home 
here with me, and a girl ought to see people once in a 
while.” She glanced at the two young creatures shrewdly, 
“Why not?” she reflected. She had never thought of it 
before, but “why not?” It wend'd be a very sensible 
arrangement. The next moment she had decided that 
it should be! Nannie’s money would be a help to the 
boy, and he needn’t depend on his doctoring business. 
“ I must put it through,” she said to herself, just as she 
might have said that she would put through a piece of 
work in the office. 

This match-making purpose made her invite David to 
supper very frequently, and evefy time he came she was 
apt, after he had taken his departure, to tramp into Nan¬ 
nie’s parlor in the hope of being told that the “sensible 
arrangement” had been made. When she found them 
together, and caught a word or two about Elizabeth, 
she had no flash of insight. Butf except to her, the situa¬ 
tion as regarded David and Elizabeth was perfectly clear. 

When, seven years before, the two boys had gone off 
together to college, Blair had confided to his friend 
that his faith in women was forever destroyed. “Though 
I shall love Elizabeth, always,” he said. 

IT 2 


THE IRON WOMAN 

“Maybe she’ll come round?” David tried to com¬ 
fort him. 

“If she doesn’t, I shall never love another woman,” 
Blair said darkly. 

David was silent. But as he and Blair were just 
then in the Damon and Pythias stage, and had sworn 
to each other that “no woman should ever come be¬ 
tween them,” he gave a hopeless shrug. “That dishes 
me,” he said to himself, “so long as he will never love 
any other girl^ can’t cut in.” 

It would hdve been lather a relief to Mrs. Richie to 
know that her son had reached this artless conclusion, 
for the thing she desired was that David’s calf¬ 
love should harden into any real purpose. Elizabeth— 
sweet-hearted below the careless selfishness of a tem¬ 
per which it never occurred to her must be controlled— 
was a rnost kissable young creature to her elders, and 
Mrs. Richie was heartily fond of her; but all the same 
she did not want a daughter-in-law with a temper! 
Elizabeth, on her part, repelled by David’s mother’s 
unattainable perfections, never allowed the older woman 
to feel intimate with her. That first meeting so 
many years ago, when they had each recoiled from 
the other, seemed to have left a gulf between them, 
which had never quite closed up. So Mrs. Richie was 
just as well pleased that in the next few years David, 
for one reason or another, did not see his old neighbor 
#rery often. By the time he was twenty-four, and well 
along in his course at the medical school, she had 
almost forgotten her vague apprehensions. The pause 
in the intimacy of the mother and son—the inevitable 
pause that comes between the boy’s seventeenth and 
twentieth years—had ended, and David and his mother 
were frank and confidential friends again; yet, though she 
did not know it, one door was still closed between them; 
“He’s forgotten all about it,” Mrs. Richie told herself 
comfortably; and never guessed that in silence he remem- 

113 


THE IRON WOMAN 


bered. Of course David’s boyish idea of honor was 
no longer subject to the claim of friendship, for Blair 
had entirely recovered from his first passion. The only 
thing he feared now was his own unworth. After all, 
what had a dumb fellow like himself to offer such a 
radiant being? 

For indeed she was radiant. The girl he had known 
nearly all his life, impetuous, devoid of self-conscious¬ 
ness, giving her sweet, sexless love with both generous 
hands, had vanished with the old frank (^^s of dropping 
an uninvited head on a boy’s shoulder. Now, though 
she was still impetuous, still unconscious of self, she 
was glowing with womanhood, and ready t<®be loved. 
She was not beautiful, except in so far as she was young, 
for youth is always beautiful; she was tall, of a sweet 
and delicate thinness, and with the faint coloring of a 
blush-rose; her dimple was exquisite; her br(^s were 
straight and fine, shading eyes wonderfully star^fcke, but 
often stormy—eyes of clear, dark amber, which, now 
that David had come home, were full of dreams. 

Before her joyous personality, no wonder poor inarticu¬ 
late David was torn with apprehensions! He did not 
share them with his mother, who, with more or less mis¬ 
giving, began to guess how things were for herself; he 
knew instinctively that Mrs. Richie’s gentle, orderly 
mind could not possibly understand Elizabeth, still less 
appreciate the peculiar charm to his inherent reason¬ 
ableness of her sweet, stormy, undisciplined tempers# 
ment. Nannie Maitland could not understand either, and 
yet it was to Nannie—kind, literal little Nannie, who 
never understood anything abstract, that David revealed 
his heart. She was intensely sympathetic, and having 
long ago relinquished the sister-in-law dream, encour¬ 
aged him to rave about Elizabeth to his heart’s content; 
in fact, for at least a year before Mrs. Maitland had 
evolved that “sensible arrangement” for her step¬ 
daughter, David, whenever he was at home, used to 
114 


THE IRON WOMAN 


go to see Nannie simply to pour out his hopes or his 
dismays. It was mostly dismays, for it seemed to him 
that Elizabeth was as uncertain as the wind! “She 
does—she doesn’t/’ he used to say to himself; and then 
he would question Nannie, who, having received certain 
confidences from the other side, would reassure him so 
warmly that he would take heart again. 

At the time that he finally dared to put his fate to the 
touch, Mrs. Maitland’s match-making intentions for 
Nannie had reached a point where she had made up her 
mind to put the matter through without any more de¬ 
lay. “I’ll speak to Mrs. Richie about it, and get the 
thing settled,’’ she said to herself; “no use dawdling 
along this way!” But just the day before she found 
time to speak to Mrs. Richie — it was in David’s mid¬ 
winter recess—something happened. 

Elizabeth had accepted—^not too eagerly, of course— 
an invitation to walk with him; and off they went, 
down Sandusky Street to the river and a^**oss the old 
covered bridge. They stopped to say how do you do 
to Mrs. Todd, who was peering out from behind the 
scarlet geraniums in the window of the “saloon.” Eliza¬ 
beth took the usual suggestive joke about a “pretty 
pair” with a little hauteur, but David beamed, and as 
he left the room he squeezed Mrs. Todd suddenly round 
her fat waist, which made her squeak but pleased her 
very much. “Made for each other!” she whispered 
wheezily; and David slipped a bill into her hand through 
sheer joy. 

“ Better have some ice-cream,” the old lady wheedled; 
“such hot blood needs cooling.” 

“Oh, Mrs. Todd, she is so cool, I don’t ne^d ice¬ 
cream,” the young fellow mourned in her motherly 
ear. 

“Get out with ye! Ain't you got eyes? She’s 
waitin’ to eat you up,—and starvin’ for ye!” And 
David hurried after Elizabeth, who had reached the 

IIS 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tollgate and was waiting, if not to eat him, at any rate 
for his company. 

“She’s a dear old soul!” he said joyfully. 

“I believe you gave her a kiss,” Elizabeth declared. 

“I gave her a hug. She said things I liked!” 

Elizabeth, guessing what the things might have 
been, swerved away from the subject, and murmured 
how pretty the country looked. There had been a 
snow-storm the night before, and the fields were glisten¬ 
ing, unbroken sheets of white; the road David chose 
was followed by a brook, that ran chuckling between 
the agate strips of ice along its banks; here and there 
a dipping branch had been caught and was held in a 
tinkling crystal prison, and here and there the ice con¬ 
quered the current, and the water could be heard gurgling 
and complainirlg tmder its snowy covering. David 
thought that all the world was beautiful,—now that 
Mrs. Todd had bidden him use his eyes! 

“Remember when we used to sled down this hill, 
EHzabeth?” 

She turned her cool, glowing face toward him and 
nodded. “Indeed I do! And you used to haul my 
sled up to the top again.” 

“I don’t think I have forgotten anything we did.” 

Instantly she veered away from personalities. “Isn’t 
it a pity Blair dislikes Mercer so much? Nannie is 
dreadfully lonely without him.” 

“She has you; I don’t see how she can be lonely.” 

“Oh, I don’t coimt for anything compared to Blair.” 
Her breath came quickly. The starry light was in her 
eyes, but he did not see it. He was not daring to look 
at her. 

“You count for everything to me,” he said, in a con¬ 
strained voice. 

She was silent. 

“ Elizabeth ... do you think you could—care? a little?” 

She looked away from him without a word. David 

ii6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


trembled j “ It’s all up—” he said to himself | and even 
as he said it, a small, cold hand was stretched out to 
him,—a hand that trembled: 

“David, I am not good enough. Truly, I’m not.” 

The very shock of having his doubts and fears crumble 
so suddenly, made him stand stock-still; he turned very 
white. “What!” he said, in a low voice, “ You— care'^ 

Oh nOj you don’t! You can’t. I can’t believe it.” 

Upon v/hich Elizabeth was instantly joyous again, 
“Well, I won’t, if you don’t want me to,” she said gaily, 
and walked on, leaving him standing, amazed, in the 
snow. Then she looked back at him over her shoulder. ——— 
At that arch and lovely look he bounded to her, 
stammering something, he did not know what himself; 
but she laughed, glowing and scolding, swerving over 
to the other side of the path. “David! We are on a 
public road. Stop! Please!” 

“To think of your caring,” he said, almost in a 
whisper. His face, with its flash of ecstasy, was like 
wine to her; all her soul spoke fearlessly in her eyes: 
“Care.? Why, David, I was only so awfully afiaid 
you weren’t going to ask me!” 

His lip trembled. He was quite speechless. But 
Elizabeth was bubbling over with joy; then suddenly, 
her exhilaration flagged. “What will your mother say? 

She doesn’t like me.” 

“Elizabeth! she loves you! How could she help 
it? How could anybody help it?” 

“It’s my temper,” she said, sighing; “my wicked 
temper. Of course I never mean anything I say, and I 
can’t imagine why people mind; but they do. Last 
week I made Cherry-pie cry. Of course she oughtn’t 
to have been hurt;—she knows me. You see I am really 
a devil, David, to make dear, old Cherry-pie unhappy! 

But I don’t believe I will ever lose my temper again as 
k)ng as I live. I am going to be good, like your moth¬ 
er.” The tears stood in her eyes. “ Mrs, Richie is so 

II7 


THE KRON WOMAN 


simply perfect I am sort of afraid of her. I wish she 
had ever been wicked, like me. David, what shall we 
do if she won’t consent?” 

“She’ll consent all right,” he said, chuckling; and 
added with the sweet and trusting egotism of youth: 
“the only thing in the world Materna wants, you know, 
is my happiness. But do you suppose it would make 
any difference if she didn’t consent? You are for me,” 
he said with an abrupt solemnity that was almost harsh. 
“Nothing in the vrorld can take you from me.” 

And she whispered, “Nothing.” 

Then David, like every lover who has ever loved, cast 
his challenge into the grinning face of Fate: “This is 
forever, Elizabeth.” 

“Forever, David.” 

On their way home, as they passed the toll-house, he 
left her and ran up the path to tap on the window; when 
Mrs. Todd beamed at him through the geraniums, '' I’ve 
got her!” he cried. And the gay old voice called back, 
“Glory be!” 

On the bridge in the gathering dusk they stood for 
some time without speaking, looking down at the river. 
Once or twice a passer-b}?' glanced at the two figures 
leaning there on the hand-rail, and wondered at the 
foolishness of people who would stand in the cold and 
look at a river full of ice; but David and Elizabeth did 
not see the passing world. The hurrying water ran in a 
turbulent, foam-streaked flood; great sheets of ice, 
rocking and grinding against one another, made a con¬ 
tinuous soft crash of sound. Sometimes one of them 
would strike the wooden casing of a pier, and then the 
whole bridge jarred and quivered, and the cake of ice, 
breaking and splintering, would heap itself on a long 
white spit that pushed up-stream through the rushing 
current. The river was yellow with mud tom up by a 
freshet back among the hills, but the last rays of the 
sun,—a disk of copper sinking into the brown haze 

ii8 


THE IRON WOMAN 


behind the hills, — caught on the broken edges of the 
icy snow, and made a sudden white glitter almost from 
shore to shore. 

“Elizabeth,” David said, “I want to tell you some¬ 
thing. I stood right here, and looked at a raft coming 
down the river, the evening that Blair told me that you 
and he—” 

“Don’t!” she said, shivering. 

“I won’t,” he told her tenderly; “you were only a 
child; it didn’t mean anything. Don’t you suppose I 
understand? But I wanted you to know that it was 
then, nearly eight years ago, when I was just a boy, 
that I realized that /—” he paused. 

She looked at him silently; her lip quivered and she 
nodded. 

“And I have never changed since,” he said. “I 
stood just here, leaning on this railing, and I was so 
wretched!” he laughed under his breath; “I didn’t 
know what was the matter with me! I was only a cub, 
you know. But”—he spoke very softly—“all of a 
sudden I knew. Elizabeth, a woman on the raft looked 
up at me. There was a little baby. . . . Dear,- it was 
then that I knew I loved you.” 

At those elemental words her heart came up into her 
throat. She could not speak, but suddenly she stooped 
and kissed the battered hand-rail where he said his 
hands had rested. 

David, horrified, glancing right and left in the dusk 
and seeing no one, put a swift arm about her in which 
to whisper a single word. Then, very softly, he kissed 
her cheek. For a moment she seemed to ebb away from 
him; then, abruptly, like the soft surge of a returning 
wave, she sank against his breast and her lips demanded 
his. . . . 

That night David told his mother. He had been 
profoundly shaken by Elizabeth’s lovely unexpected 
motion there in the twilight on the bridge; it was a 

119 


THE IRON WOMAN 


motion so divinely unconscious of the outside world, 
that he was moved to the point of finding no words to 
say how moved ho, was. But she had felt him tremble 
from head to foot '^hen her lips burned against his,—so 
she needed no words. His silence still lasted when, 
after an hour next door with her, he came home and sat 
down on the sofa beside his mother. He nuzzled his 
blond head against hers for a moment; then slipped an 
arm round her waist. 

“It’s all right, Materna,” he said, with a sort of gasp. 

“What is, dear?” 

“Oh, mother, the idea of asldng! The only thing in 
the world.” 

“You mean—^you and Elizabeth?” 

“Yes,” he said. 

She was silent for a moment; when she spoke her 
voice broke a little. “ When was it, dear?” 

“This afternoon,” he said. And once started, he 
overflowed: “I can’t get my breath yet, though I’ve 
known it since a quarter past four!” 

Mrs. Richie laughed, and then sighed. “David, of 
course I’m happy, if you are; but—I hope she’s good 
enough for you, dear.” She felt him stiffen against her 
shoulder. 

“Good enough? for nie! Materna, she is perfect! 
Don’t you suppose I know? I’ve know her nearly all 
my life, and I can say she is perfect. She is as perfect 
as you are; she said you were perfect this afternoon. 
Yes; I never supposed I could say that any vroman 
was as good, and lovely, and pure, as you—” 

“David, please don’t say such things.” 

David was not listening. “But I can say it of Eliza¬ 
beth ! Oh, what a lucky fellow I am! I always thought 
Blair would get her. He’s such a mighty good fellow,— 
and so darned good-looking, confound him!” David 
ruminated affectionately. “And he can talk; he’s not 
bottled up, like me. To think she would look at me, 

120 


THE IRON WOMAN 


when she could have had him,—or anybody else! It 
seems kind of mean to cut Blair out, when he isn’t 
here. He hasn’t seen her, you know, for about two 
years.” 

“Perhaps you would like to call it off until he gets 
home, and give him a chance?” 

David grinned. “No, thank you. Oh, Materna, 
she is, you know, really, so—so sort of wonderful! Some 
time I want to talk to you about her. I don’t believe 
anybody quite understands Elizabeth but me. But to 
think of her caring for me I To think of my having two 
such women to care for me.” He took her hand gently 
and kissed it. “ Mother,” he said—he spoke with almost 
painful effort; “Mother, I want to tell you something. 
I want to tell you, because, being what you are, you 
can’t in the least understand what it means; but I do 
want you to know: I’ve never kissed any woman but 
you, Materna, until I kissed— Her.*' 

“Oh,” said Helena Richie, in a stifled voice, “don’t, 
David, don’t; I can’t bear it! And if she doesn’t make 
you happy—” 

“Make me happy?” David said. He paused; that 
unasked kiss burned once more against his lips; he 
almost shivered at the pang of it. “Materna,” he said 
hoarsely, “if she or I were to die to-night, I, at any 
rate, have had happiness enough in these few hours to 
have made it worth while to have lived.” 

“ Love doesn’t mean just happiness,” she said. 

David was silent for a moment; then he said, very 
gently, “You are thinking of—of your little boy, who 
died?” 

“Yes; and of my marriage; it was not happy, 
David.” 

He pressed his cheek against hers, without speaking. 
The grief of an unhappy marriage he had long ago guessed, 
and in this moment of his own happiness the remembrance 
of it was intolerable to him. As for the other grief; 

I3I 


THE IRON WOMAN 


*‘when I think of the baby,” he said, softly, “I feel as if 
that little beggar gave me my mother. I feel as if I had 
his job; and if I am not a good son—” he stopped, and 
looked at her, smiling; but something in her face—per¬ 
haps the pitiful effort to smile back through the tears 
of an old, old sorrow, gave him a sudden, solemn thrill; 
the race pain stirred in him; he seemed to see his own 
child, dead, in Elizabeth’s arms. 

“Mother!” he said, thickly, and caught her in his 
arms. She felt his heart pounding heavily in his side, 
but she smiled. “Yes,” she said, “my little boy gave 
me another son, though I didn’t deserve him! No, 
no, I didn’t,” she insisted, laying her soft mother-hand 
over his protesting lips; “I used to wonder sometimes, 
David, why God trusted you to me, instead of to a—a 
better woman—” again she checked his outburst that 
God had never made a better woman! “Hush, dear, 
hush. But I didn’t mean that love might mean sorrow. 
There are worse things in the world than sorrow,” she 
ended, almost in a whisper. 

“Yes, there are worse things,” he said quietly; “of 
course I know that. But they are not possible things 
where Elizabeth is concerned. There is only one thing 
that can hurt us: Death.” 

“Oh, my dear, my dear! Life can hurt so much 
more than death! So muck more.” 

But David had nothing more to say of life and love. 
He retreated abruptly to the matter of fact; he had 
gone to his limit, not only of expression, but of that 
modesty of soul which forbids exposure of the emotions, 
and is as exquisite in a young man as physical modesty 
is in a girl. He was unwilling, indeed he was unable, to 
show even to his mother, even, perhaps, to Elizabeth, the 
speechless depths that had been stirred that afternoon 
by the first kiss of passion, and stirred again that night 
by the sight of tears for a baby,—a baby dead for al¬ 
most a quarter of a century! He got up, thrust his 

122 


THE IRON WOMAN 


hands into his pockets, and whistled. “Heaven knows 
how long it will be before we can be married! How 
soon do you think I can count on getting patients enough 
to get married?” 

Mrs. Richie laughed, though there was still a break 
of pain in her voice. “My dear boy, when you leave 
the medical school I mean to give you an allow¬ 
ance which,—” 

“No, Maternal” he interrupted her; “I am going to 
stand on my own legs!” David’s feeling about self- 
support gave him a satisfaction out of all proportion to 
the pain it sometimes gave his mother. She winced 
now, as if his words hurt her. 

“ David! All that I have is yours.” 

“No,” he said again. “I couldn’t accept an3rthing. 
I believe if a man can’t take care of his wife himself, he 
has no business to have a wife. It’s bad enough for 
you to be supporting a big, hungry medical student; but 
I swear you sha’n’t feed his wife, too. I can’t be in¬ 
debted, even to you!” he ended, with the laughing cock¬ 
sureness of high-minded youth. 

“Indebted? Oh, David!” she said. For a moment 
his words wounded her; but when he had left her to 
go back to Elizabeth again, and she sat alone by her 
fireside, she forgot this surface wound in some deeper 
pain. David had said he had never kissed any woman 
but her, until he kissed Her. He had said that the 
things that were “worse than death” were not possible 
to Elizabeth. For a moment this soft mother felt a 
stab of something Hke jealousy; then her thought went 
back to that deeper pain. He had not supposed any¬ 
body could be as “perfect” as his mother. Helena 
Richie cowered, as if the sacred words were whips; she 
covered her face with her hands, and sat a long time 
without moving. Perhaps she was thinking of a certain 
old letter, locked away in her desk, and in her heart,—for 
she knew every word of it: 

123 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“My child, your secret belongs to your Heavenly 
Father. It is never to be taken from His hands, except 
for one reason: to save some other child of His. Never 
for any smaller reason of peace of mind to yourself.” 

When she lifted her bowed head from her hands the 
fire was out. There were tears upon her face. 


CHAPTER X 


It was the very next afternoon that Mrs,. Maitland 
found time to look after Nannie’s matrimonial interests. 
In the raw December twilight she tramped muddily 
into Mrs. Richie’s firelit parlor, which was fragrant with 
hyacinths blossoming on every window-sill. Mr. Fer¬ 
guson had started them in August in his own cellar, 
for, as any landlord will tell you, it is the merest matter 
of business to do all you can for a good tenant. Mrs. 
Maitland found her superintendent and Mrs. Richie 
just shaking hands on David’s luck, Mrs. Richie a little 
tremulous, and Robert Ferguson a little grudging, of 
course. 

“Well, I hope they’ll be happy,” he said, sighing; 
“I suppose some marriages are happy, but—” 

“Oh, Mr. Ferguson, you are delightful!” Mrs. Richie 
said; and it was at that moment that Mrs. Maitland 
came tramping in. Instantly the large, vital presence 
made the charming room seem small and crowded. 
There were too many flowers, too many ornaments, 
too many photographs of David. Mrs. Maitland sat 
down heavily on a gilded chair, that creaked so ominously 
that she rose and looked at it impatiently. 

“Foolish sort of furniture,” she said; “give me some¬ 
thing solid, please, to sit on. Well, Mrs. Richie! How 
do you do?” 

“Nannie has told you our great news?” Mrs. Richie 
inquired. 

“Oh, so it’s come to a head, has it?” Mrs. Maitland 
said, vastly pleased. “Of course I knew what was in 

125 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the wind, but I didn’t know it was settled. Fact is, 1 
haven’t seen her, except at breakfast, and then I was in 
too much of a hurry to think of it. Well, well, nothing 
could be better! That’s what I came to see you about; 
I wanted to hurry things along. What do you say to it, 
Mr. Ferguson?” 

Mrs. Maitland looked positively benign. She was 
sitting, a little gingerly, on the edge of the yellow dam¬ 
ask sofa at one side of the fireplace, her feet wide apart, 
her skirt pulled back over her knees, so that her scorch¬ 
ing petticoat was somewhat liberally displayed. Her 
big shoes began to steam in the comfortable heat of a 
soft-coal fire that was blazing and snapping between the 
brass jambs. 

Mrs. Richie had drawn up a chair beside her, and 
Robert Ferguson stood with his elbow on the mantel¬ 
piece looking down at them. Even to Mr. Ferguson 
Mrs. Maitland’s presence in the gently feminine room 
was incongruous. There was a little table at the side 
of the sofa, and Mrs. Maitland, thrusting out a large, 
gesticulating hand, swept a silver picture-frame to the 
floor; in the confusion of picking it up and putting it 
into a safer place the little emotional tension of the 
moment vanished. Mrs. Richie winked away a tear, 
and laughed, and said it was too absurd to think that 
their children were men and women, with their own 
lives and interests and hopes—and love-afiairs! 

“But love-making is in the air, apparently,” she said: 
“young Knight is going to be married.” 

“What, Goose Molly’s stepson?” Mrs. Maitland said. 
“ She used to make sheep’s-eyes at—at somebody I knew. 
But she didn’t get him! Well, I must give the boy a 
present.” 

“And the next thing,” Mrs. Richie went on, “will be 
Nannie’s engagement. Only it will be hard to find any¬ 
body good enough for Nannie!” 

Nannie?** said Mrs. Maitland blankly. 

126 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“She is to be Elizabeth’s bridesmaid, of course,—^ 
unless she gets married before our wedding comes off* 
A young doctor has to have patients before he can have 
a wife, so I’m afraid the chances are Elizabeth will be 
Nannie’s bridesmaid.’’ 

She was so full of these maternal and womanly visions 
that the sudden slight rigidity of Mrs. Maitland’s face 
did not strike her. 

“Nannie has been so interested,’’ Mrs. Richie went 
on. “David will always be grateful to her for helping 
his cause. 1 don’t know what he would have done 
without Nannie to confide in!’’ 

Mrs. Maitland’s face relaxed. So Nannie had not 
been slighted ? She herself, Nannie’s mother, had 
made a mistake, that was all. Well, she was sorry; 
she wished it had been Nannie. Poor thing, it was 
lonely for her, in that big, empty house! But these 
two people, patting themselves on the back with their 
personal satisfaction about their children, they must 
not guess her wish. There was no resentment in her 
mind; it was one of the chances of business. David 
had chosen Elizabeth,—more fool David! “for Nannie 
’ll have—” Mrs. Maitland made some rapid calcula* 
tions; “but it’s not my kettle of fish,’’ she reflected; 
and hoisted herself up from the low, deeply cushioned 
sofa. 

“I hope Elizabeth will put her mind on housekeep¬ 
ing,’’ she said. “A young doctor has to get all the pork 
he can for his shilling! He needs a saving wife.’’ 

“She’ll have to be a saving wife. I’m afraid,’’ Mrs. 
Richie said, with rueful pride, “for that foolish boy of 
mine declines, if you please, to be helped out by an 
allowance from me.’’ 

“Oh, he’ll have more sense -when he’s more in love,’* 
Mrs. Maitland assured her easily. “I never knew a 
man yet who would refuse honest money when it was 
offered to him. Well, Mrs. Richie, with all this marry- 
9 t 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ing going on, I suppose the next thing will be you and 
friend Ferguson.” Even as she said it, she saw in a 
flash an inevitable meaning in the words, and she gave 
a great guffaw of laughter. “Bless you! I didn’t 
mean that! I meant you’d be picking up a wife some¬ 
where, Mr. Ferguson, and Mrs. Richie, here, would be 
finding a husband. But the other way would be easier, 
and a very sensible arrangement.” 

The two victims of her peculiar sense of humor held 
themselves as well as they could. Mrs. Richie reddened 
slightly, but looked blank. Robert Ferguson’s jaw 
actually dropped, but he was able to say casually that 
of course it would be some time before the young people 
could be married. 

“Well, give my love to Elizabeth,” Mrs. Maitland said: 
“tell her not to jump into the river if she gets angry 
with David. Do you remember how she did that in 
one of her furies at Blair, Mr. Ferguson?” She gave a 
grunt of a laugh, and took herself off, pausing at the 
front door to call back, “Don’t forget my good advice, 
you people!” 

Robert Ferguson, putting on his hat with all possible 
expedition, got out of the house almost as quickly as 
she did. “I’d like to choke her!” he said to himself. 
He felt the desire to choke Mrs. Maitland several times 
that evening as he sat in his library pretending to 
read his newspaper. “She ought to be ashamed of 
herself! Mrs. Richie will think I have been—heaven 
knows what she will think!” 

But the truth was, Mrs. Richie thought nothing at all; 
she forgot the incident entirely. It was Robert Fer¬ 
guson who did the embarrassed thinking. 

As for Mrs. Maitland, she went home through Mercer’s 
mire and fog, her iron face softening into almost feminine 
concern. She was saying to herself that if Nannie 
didn’t care, why, site didn’t care! “But if she hankers 
after him”—Mrs. Maitland’s face twinged with annoy- 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ance; “if she hankers after him, I’ll make it up to her 
in some way. I’ll give her a good big check!” But 
she must make sure about the “hankering.” It would 
not be difficult to make sure. In these silent years 
together, the strong nature had drawn the weak nature 
to it, as a magnet draws a speck of iron. Nannie, timid 
to the point of awe, never daring even in her thoughts 
to criticize the powerful personality that dominated her 
daily life, nestled against it, so to speak, with perfect 
content. Sarah Maitland’s esthetic deficiencies which 
separated her so tragically from her son, did not alienate 
Nannie. The fact that her stepmother was rich, and 
yet lived in a poverty-stricken locality; that the incon¬ 
venience of the old house amounted to squalor; that 
they were almost completely isolated from people of 
their own class;—none of these things disturbed Nannie. 
They were merely “Mamma’s ways,” that was all there 
was to say about them. She was not confidential with 
Mrs. Maitland, because she had nothing to confide. 
But if her stepmother had ever asked any personal 
question, she would have been incapable of not replying. 
Mrs. Maitland knew that, and proposed to satisfy her¬ 
self as to the “hankering.” 

Supper was on the table when she got home, and 
though while bolting her food she glanced at Nannie 
rather keenly, she did not try to probe her feelings. 
“But she looks down in the mouth,” Sarah Maitland 
thought. There must have been delicacy somewhere 
in the big nature, for she was careful not to speak of 
Elizabeth’s engagement before Harris, for fear the girl 
might, by some involuntary tremor of lip or eyelid, 
betray herself. 

“ I’ll look in on you after supper,” she said. 

Nannie, with a start, said, “Oh, thank you. Mamma.” 

When Mrs. Maitland, with her knitting and a fistful of 
unopened letters, came over to the parlor, she had also., 
tucked into her belt, a check. 

12Q 


THE IRON WOMAN 


It had never occurred to Nannie, in all these years 
and with a very liberal allowance, to mitigate her parlor. 
It was still a place of mirrors, grown perhaps a little 
dim; of chandeliers in balloons of brown paper-muslin, 
which, to be sure, had split here and there with age, so 
that a glimmer of cut glass sparkled dimly through the 
cracks; a place of marble-topped tables, and crimson 
brocade curtains dingy with age and soot; a place 
where still the only human thing was Nannie’s drawing- 
board. She was bending over it now, copying with a 
faithful pencil a little picture of a man and a maid, and 
a dove and a Love. She was going to give the drawing 
to Elizabeth; in fact, she had begun it several days 
ago with joyous anticipation of this happy happening. 
But now, as she worked, her hand trembled. She had 
had a letter from Blair, and all her joyousness had fled: 

*^The Dean is an ass^ of course; hut mother'll get ex* 
cited about it^ Vm afraid. Do smooth her down, if you 
can.** 

No wonder Nannie’s hand trembled! 

Mrs. Maitland, putting her letters on the table, sat 
down heavily and began to knit. She glanced at Nan¬ 
nie over her spectacles. '‘Better get through with 
it,” she said to herself. Then, aloud, “Well, Nannie, so 
David and Elizabeth have made a match of it ?” 

For a minute Nannie’s face brightened. ‘‘Yes! 
Isn’t it fine? I’m so pleased. David has been crazy 
about her ever since he was a boy.” 

Well! She was heart-whole! There was no doubt 
of that; Mrs. Maitland, visibly relieved, dismissed from 
her mind the whole foolish business of love-making. 
She began to read her letters, Nannie watching hen 
furtively. When the third letter was taken up—a 
letter with the seal of the University in the upper left- 
hand corner of the envelope—Blair’s sister breathed 
130 


THE IRON WOMAN 


quickly. Mrs. Maitland, ripping the envelope open 
with a thrust of her forefinger, read it swiftly; then 
again, slowly. Then she said something under her 
breath and otruck her fist on the table. Nannie’s fingers 
whitened on her pencil. Sarah Maitland got up and 
stood on the hearth-rug, her back to the fire. 

“I’ll have to go East,” she said, and began to bite 
her forefinger. 

“Oh, Mamma,” Nannie broke out, “I am sure there 
isn’t anything really wrong. Perhaps he has been— 
a little foolish. Men are foolish in college. David got 
into hot water lots of times. But Blair hasn’t done 
anything really bad, and—” 

Mrs. Maitland gave her a somber look. “He wrote 
to you, did he?” she said. And Nannie realized that 
she had not advanced her brother’s cause. Mrs. Mait¬ 
land picked up her letters and began to sort them out. 
“ When is he going to grow up?” she said. “He’s twen¬ 
ty-four; and he’s been dawdling round at college for 
the last two years! He’s not bad; he hasn’t stuff enough 
in him to be bad. He is just lazy and useless; and he’s 
had every chance young man could have!” 

“Mamma!” Nannie protested, “it isn’t fair to speak 
that way of Blair, and it isn’t true, not a word of it!”" 
Nannie, the ’fraid-cat of twenty years ago,—afraid still of 
thunder-storms and the dark and Sarah Maitland, and 
what not,—Nannie, when it came to defending Blair, 
had all the audacious courage of love. “He is not 
lazy, he is not useless; he is—^he is—” Nannie stam¬ 
mered with angry distress; “he is dear, and good, and 
kind, and never did any harm in his life. Never! It’s 
perfectly dreadful. Mamma, for you to say such things 
about him!” 

“Well, well!” said Sarah Maitland, lifting an amused 
eyebrow. It was as if a humming-bird had attacked 
a steel billet. Her face softened into pleased affection. 
“Well, stick up for him,” she said; “I like it in you. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


my dear, though what you say is foolish enough. You 
remind me of your mother. But your brother has 
brains. Yes, I’ll say that for him,—he’s like me; he 
has brains. That’s why I’m so out of patience with 
him,” she ended, lapsing into moody displeasure again. 
“If he was a fool, I wouldn’t mind his behaving like a 
fool. But he has brains.” Then she said, briefly, 
“’Night,” and tramped off to the dining-room. 

The next morning when Nannie, a little pale from a 
worried night, came down to breakfast, her stepmother’s 
place was empty. 

“Yes,” Harris explained; “she went off at twelve. 
Miss Nannie. She didn’t let on where. She said you’d 
know.” 

“I know,” poor Nannie said, and turned paler than 
ever. 


CHAPTER XI 


After Mrs. Maitland had had an interview with the 
Dean, she went off across the yard, under the great elms 
dripping in the rainy January thaw. Following his 
directions, she found her way through the corridors of 
a new building whose inappropriate expensiveness was 
obvious at every turn. Blair had rooms there, as had 
most of the sons of rich fathers. The whole place smelt 
of money! In Blair’s apartment money was less obvious 
than beauty—^but it was expensive beauty. He had a 
few good pictures, and on one wall a wonderful tap¬ 
estry of forest foliage and roebucks, that he had 
picked up in Europe at a price which added to the dealer’s 
affection for traveling Americans. The furnishing was 
in quiet and, for that period, remarkably good taste; 
masculine enough to balance a certain delicacy of detail 
—exquisite Tanagra figures, water-colors and pastels 
of women in costumes of rose and violet gauze, in¬ 
cense smoldering in an ivory jar, and much small 
bijouterie that meant an almost feminine appreciation 
of exquisite and costly prettiness. 

Mrs. Maitland came tramping down the hall, her face 
set and stem; but suddenly, almost at Blair’s door, 
she paused. Some one was singing; she knew the voice 
—beautiful, joyous, beating and pulsating vfith life: 

“ Drink to me only with thine eyes, 

And I will pledge with mine.” 

She moved over to a window that lit the long corridor, 
and listened: 

“ Or leave a kiss . . 

133 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Sarah Maitland stared out into the rain; the bare 
branches of the trees whipped against one another in 
the wind, but she did not see them. She leaned her foie- 
head on the glass, listening to the golden voice. A 
warm wave seemed to rise in her breast, a wave of 
cosmic satisfaction in this vitality that was hers, be¬ 
cause he was hers! Her ''.yes blurred so with emotion 
that she did not see the rocking branches in the rain. 
All the hardness of her face melted, under those melting 
cadences into exultant maternity; 

“ Or leave a kiss but in the cup, 

And I’ll not look for wine; 

The thirst that from the soul—” 

She smiled, then turned and knocked peremptorily 
at her son’s door. 

Blair, pausing in his song to comment on a thirst 
that rises otherwhere than in the soul, roared out a 
jolly command to “come in!” but for an instant he did 
not realize who stood on the threshold; nor was his 
mother able to distinguish him in the group of men 
lounging about a room dim with tobacco smoke. He 
was standing with his back to the door, pulling a some¬ 
what reluctant cork from a bottle of sherry gripped 
between his knees. 

Blair was immensely popular at college, not only 
because of the easy generosities of his wealth,—which 
were often only a pleasant form of selfishness that 
brought the fellows about him as honey brings flies, 
but because of a certain sympathetic quality of mind, 
a genius for companionship that was almost a genius 
for friendship. Now, his room was full of men. One 
of his guests was sitting on the window-sill, kicking 
his heels and sv/aying rhythmically back and forth to 
the twang of his banjo. One had begun to read aloud 
with passionate emphasis a poem, of which happily 
Mrs. Maitland did not catch the words; all of them were 
smoking. 


134 


THE IRON WOMAN 


The door opened, but no one entered. One of the 
young men, feeling the draught, glanced languidly over 
his shoulder,—and got on his feet with extraordinary 
expedition! He said something under his breath. 
But it was the abrupt silence of the room that made 
Blair turn round. It did not need his stammering 
dismay, his half-cringing—“Clear out, will you, you 
fellows ”—to get the men out of the room. They did 
not know who she was, but they knew she was Some¬ 
body. She did not speak, but the powerful personality 
seemed to sweep in and clear the atmosphere of its 
sickly triviality. She stood blocking up the doorway, 
looking at them; they were mostly Seniors, but there 
was not a man among them who did not feel foolish 
under that large and quiet look. Then she stepped a 
little aside. The movement was unmistakable. They 
jostled one another like a flock of sheep in their effort 
to get away quickly. Somebody muttered, “Good 
afternoon—” but the others were speechless. They 
left a speechless host behind them. 

Mrs. Maitland, her rusty bonnet very much on one 
side, watched them go; then she closed the door be¬ 
hind them, and stood looking at her son who was still 
holding the corkscrew in his hands. Her feet were 
planted firmly wide apart, her hands were on her hips; 
her eyebrow was lifting ominously. “Well.?” she said; 
with the echo of that golden voice still in her ears, her 
own voice was, even to herself, unexpectedly mild. 

“ I didn't expect you,” Blair managed to say. 

“I inferred as much,” she said dryly; “so this is the 
way you keep up with your classes.?” 

“There are no lectures at this time of day,” he said. 
“If you had been so kind, my dear mother, as to let 
me know you were coming”—he spoke with that exag¬ 
gerated and impertinent politeness that confesses fright; 
“I would have met you. Instead of that, you—^you— 
you burst in—” he was getting whiter and whiter. The 

135 


THE IRON WOMAN 


thought that the men had seen the unkempt figure, 
the powerful face, the straggling locks of hair, the bare 
hands,—seen, in fact, the unlovely exterior of a large 
and generous nature, a nature which, alas, he, her son, 
had never seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, 
of course, that she was his mother, was positively un¬ 
endurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice 
shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; 
the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling 
for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had 
in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his 
mother was an esthetic insult to motherhood. 

“I’ve no fault to find with your friends being here, 
if they don’t interfere with your studies,” Mrs. Mait¬ 
land said. 

“ Oh,” he said rather blankly; then his shame of her 
stung him into fury; “why didn’t you tell me that 
you—” 

“I’ve been to see the Dean,” she said; “sit down 
there and listen to me. Here, give me a chair; not 
that pincushion thing! Give me a chair fit for a 
man to sit on,—^if you’ve got one in this upholstery 
shop.” 

Blair, with trembling hands, pushed a mahogany 
chair to her side. He did not sit down himself. He 
stood with folded arms and downcast eyes. 

She was not unkind; she was not even ungentle. 
She v/as merely explicit: he was a fool. All this busi¬ 
ness,—she pointed to the bottle and the empty glasses; 
all this business was idiotic, it was a boy’s foolishness. 
“It shows how young you are, Blair,” she said kindly, 
“though the Lord knows you are old enough in years 
to have some sense!” But if he kept the foolishness 
up, and this other tomfoolery on account of which she 
had had to leave the Works and spend her valuable time 
talking to the Dean, why, he might be expelled. He 
would certainly be suspended. And that would put 
136 


THE IRON WOMAN 


off his getting into business for still another year. “And 
you are twenty-four!” she said. 

While she talked she looked about her, and the mother- 
softness began to die out of her eyes. Sarah Maitland 
had never seen her son’s room; she saw, now, soft- 
green hangings, great bowls of roses, a sideboard with 
an array of glasses, a wonderfully carved ivory jar 
standing on a teak-wood table whose costliness, even 
to her uneducated eyes, was obvious. Suddenly she 
put on her spectacles, and still talking, rose, and walked 
slowly about, the room glancing at the water-colors. 
By and by, just at the end of her harangue,—to which 
Blair had listened in complete silence,—she paused 
before a row of photographs on the mantelpiece; then, 
in the midst of a sentence, she broke off with an ex¬ 
clamation, leaned forward, and seizing a photograph, 
tore it in two, across the smiling face and the bare bosom, 
across the lovely, impudent line of the thigh, and flung 
it underfoot. “Shame on you! to let your mother 
see a thing like that!” 

“ I didn’t ask my mother to see it.” 

“If you have thoughts like this,” she said, “Eliza¬ 
beth did well to throw you over for David.” 

Blair lifted one eyebrow with a glimmer of interest. 
“Oh, David has got her, has he?” 

“ At any rate, he’s a man ! He doesn’t live like this”— 
she made a contemptuous gesture; “muddling with 
silks and paintings, and pictures of bad women! What 
kind of a room is this for a man ? Full of flowers and 
stinking jars, and cushions, and truck? It’s more fit 
for a—a creature like that picture”—she set her heel 
on the snSling face; “than for a man! I ought never 
to have sent you here. I ought to have put you to 
puddling.” She looked at him in growing agitation. 
“My God! Blair, what are you—living this way, with 
silks and perfumery and clay baby dolls? You’ve got 
no guts to you! I didn’t mind your making a fool of 

137 


THE IRON WOMAN 


yourself; that’s natural; nobody can get to be a man 
till he’s been a fool; but this—” She stood there, with 
one hand on the mantelpiece beside the row of photo¬ 
graphs and bits of carving and little silver trinkets, 
and looked at him in positive fright. “And you are 
my son,” she said. 

The torrent of her angry shame suddenly swept Blair’s 
manhood of twenty-four years away; her very power 
stripped him bare as a baby; it almost seemed as if she 
had sucked his masculinity out of him and incorporated 
it into herself. He stood there like a cringing school¬ 
boy expecting to be whipped. “One of the men gave 
me that picture; I—” 

“ You ought to have slapped his face! Listen to me: 
you are going to be looked after,—do you hear me? 
You are going to be watched. Do you understand?” 
She gathered up the whole row of photographs, innocent 
arud offensive together, and threw them into the fire. 
“You are going to walk straight, or you are coming 
home, and going to work” 

It was a match to gunpowder; in an instant Blair’s 
temper, the terrific temper of the uniformly and lazily 
amiable man, flashed into furious words. 

Stammering with rage, he told her what he thought 
of her; to record his opinion is not for edification. Even 
Sarah Maitland flinched before it. She left him with a 
bang. She saw the Dean again, and her recommenda¬ 
tions of espionage were so extreme and so unwdse that 
he found himself taking Blair’s part in his effort to save 
the young man from the most insolent intrusion upon 
his privacy. She went back to Mercer in a whirl of 
anger but in somber silence. She had scorched and stung 
under the truths her son told her about herself; she had 
bled under the lies she had told him as to her feeling for 
him. She looked ten years older for that hour in his room. 
But she had nothing to say. She told poor, frightened 
Nannie that she had “seen Master Blair”; she added 

1.38 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that he was a fool. To Robert Ferguson she was a 
little more explicit: 

“ Blair has not been behaving himself; he’s in debt; he 
has been gambling. See that all these bills are paid. 
Tell Watson to give him a hundred dollars more a month; 
I won’t have him running in debt in this way. Now 
what about the Duluth order?” 


CHAPTER Xn 


Mr. Ferguson made no protest in regard to Blair’s 
increased allowance. “ If his mother wants to ruin him, 
it isn’t my business,” he said. The fact was, he had not 
recovered from his astonished resentment at Sarah 
Maitland’s joke in Mrs. Richie’s parlor. He thought 
about it constantly, and asked himself whether he did 
not owe his neighbor an apology of some kind. The 
difficulty was to know what kind, for after all he was 
perfectly innocent! “Such an idea never entered my 
head,” he thought angrily; “but of course, if there 
has been anything in my conduct to put it into Mrs. 
Maitland’s head, I ought to be thrashed! Perhaps 
I’d better not go in next door more than two or three 
times a week?” So, for once, Robert Ferguson was 
distinctly out with his employer, and when she told him 
to see that Blair had a hundred dollars more a month, 
he said, in his own mind, “be hanged to him! What 
difference does it make to me if she ruins him?” and 
held his tongue—until the next day. Then he barked 
out a remonstrance: “I suppose you know your own 
business, but if I had a boy I wouldn’t increase his allow¬ 
ance because he was in debt.” 

“I want to keep him from getting in debt again,” 
she explained, her face falling into troubled lines. 

“ If you will allow me to say so—having been a boy 
myself, that’s not the way to do it.” 

Sarah Maitland flung herself back in her chair, and 
struck the desk with her fist. “ I am at my wit’s end to 
know what to do about him! My idea has been to make 
140 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a man of him, by giving him what he wants, not making 
him fuss over five-cent pieces. He's had everything; 
he’s never heard ^no* in his life. And yet—^look at 
him!” 

“That’s the trouble with him. He’s had too much. 
He needs a few no’s. But he’s like most rich boys; 
there isn’t one rich man’s son in ten who is worth his 
salt. If he were my boy,” said Robert Ferguson, with 
that infallibility which everybody feels in regard to the 
way other people’s children should be brought up, “if 
he were my son. I’d put him to work this summer.” 

Mrs. Maitland blew her lips out in a great sigh; then 
nibbled her forefinger, staring with blank eyes straight 
ahead of her. She was greatly perplexed. “I’ll think it 
over,” she said; “ I’ll think it over. Hold on; what’s 
your hurry? I want to ask you something: your 
neighbor there, Mrs. Richie, seems to be a very attractive 
woman; ‘fair and forty,’ as the saying is—only I guess 
she’s nearer fifty? But she’s mighty good-looking, 
whatever her age is.” 

The color came into Robert Ferguson’s face; this time 
he was really offended. Mrs. Maitland was actually 
venturing— “I have never noticed her looks,” he 
said stiffly, and rose. 

“It just struck me when I caught you in there the 
other day,” she ruminated; “what do you know 
about her?” Buried deep in the casual question was 
another question, but Robert Ferguson did not hear it; 
she was not going to venture I He was so relieved, that 
he was instantly himself again. He told her briefly 
what little he knew: Mrs. Richie was a widow; hus¬ 
band dead many years. “I have an idea he was a 
crooked stick,—more from what she hasn’t said than 
what she has said. There’s a friend of hers I meet 
once in a while at her house, a Doctor King, and he 
intimated to me that her husband was a bad lot. It 
appears he hurt their child, when he was drunk. She 

I4I 


THE IRON WOMAN 


never forgave him. I don’t blame her, I’m sure; the 
baby died. It was after the death of the husband that 
she adopted David. She has no relations apparently; 
some friends in Old Chester, I believe; this Doctor King 
is one of ’em.” 

” Is she going to marry him?” Mrs. Maitland said. 

“There might be objections on the part of the present 
incumbent,” he said, with his meager smile. 

Mrs. Maitland admitted that the doctor’s wife pre¬ 
sented difficulties; “but perhaps she’ll die,” she said, 
cheerfully; “I’m interested to know that Mrs. Richie has 
friends; I was wondering—” She did not say what she 
wondered. “She’s a nice woman, Robert Ferguson, 
and a good woman, and a good-looking woman, too; 
‘fair and’—well, say ‘fifty’I And if you had any 
sense—” 

But this time Robert Ferguson really did get out of 
the office. 

His advice about Blair, however, seemed superfluous. 
So far as behavior went, Mrs. Maitland had no further 
occasion to increase his allowance. His remaining 
months in the university were decorous enough, though 
his scholarship was no credit to him. He “squeaked 
through,” as he expressed it to his sister, gaily, when 
she came east to see him graduate, three years behind 
the class in which he had entered college. But as to 
his conduct, that domiciliary visit had hardened him into 
a sort of contemptuous common sense. And his an¬ 
noyed and humiliated manhood, combined with his 
esthetic taste, sufficed, also, to keep things fairly peace¬ 
ful when he was at home, which was rarely for more 
than a week or two at a time. Quarrels with his mother 
had become excruciating experiences, like discords on 
the piano; they set his teeth on edge, though they never 
touched his heart. To avoid them, he would, he told 
Nannie, chuckling at her horror,—“lie like the devil!” 
His lying, however, was nothing more serious than a 

142 


THE IRON WOMAN 


careful and entirely insincere politeness; but it an« 
swered his purpose, and “rows,” as he called them, were 
very rare; although, indeed, his mother did her part 
in avoiding them, too. To Sarah Maitland, a difference 
with her son meant a pang at the very center of her 
being—her maternity; her heart was seared by it, but 
her taste was not offended because she had no taste. 
So, for differing reasons, peace was kept. The next 
fall, after a summer abroad, Blair went back to the 
university and took two or three special courses; also 
he began to paint rather seriously; all of which was his 
way of putting off the evil day of settling down in Mercer. 

Meantime, life grew quite vivid to his sister. Eliza¬ 
beth had once said that Nannie was “bom an old maid”; 
and certainly these tranquil, gently useless years of 
being very busy about nothing, and living quite alone 
with her stepmother, had emphasized in her a simplic¬ 
ity and literalness of mind that was sometimes very 
amusing to the other three friends. At any rate, hers 
was a pallid little personality—perhaps it could not 
have been anything else in the household of a woman 
like Sarah Maitland, with whom, domestically, it was 
always either peace, or a sword! Nannie was incap¬ 
able of anything but peace. “You are a Traid-cat,” 
Elizabeth used to tell her, “but you’re a perfect dear!” 
“Nannie is unscrupulously good,” Blair said once; and 
her soft stubbornness in doing anything she conceived 
to be her duty, warranted his criticism. But during 
the first year that David and Elizabeth were engaged, 
her stagnant existence in the silent old house began to 
stir; little shocks of reality penetrated the gentle prim¬ 
ness of her thought, and she came creeping out into the 
warmth and sunshine of other people’s happiness; in¬ 
deed, her shy appreciation of the lovers’ experiences 
became almost an experience of her own, so closely did 
she nestle to all their emotions! It was a real blow to 
her when it was decided that David should enter a 

10 143 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Philadelphia hospital as an interne. “Won’t he be at 
home even for the long vacations?” Nannie asked, 
anxiously; when she was told that hospitals did not 
give “vacations,” her only consolation was that she 
would have to console Elizabeth. 

But when Robert Ferguson heard what was going to 
happen, he had nothing to console him. “I’ll have a 
love-sick girl on my hands,” he complained to Mrs. 
Richie. “ You’ll have to do your share of it,” he barked 
at her. He had come in through the green door in the 
garden wall, with a big clump of some perennial in his 
hands, and a trowel under one arm. “Peonies have to 
be thinned out in the fall,” he said grudgingly, “and I 
want to get rid of this lot. Where shall I put ’em?” 

It was a warm October afternoon, and Mrs. Richie, 
who had been sitting on the stone bench under the big 
hawthorn in her garden, reading, until the dusk hid her 
page, looked up gratefully. “You are robbing your¬ 
self; I believe that is your precious white peony!” 

“ It’s only half of it, and I get as much good out of it 
here as in my own garden,” he grunted (he was sitting 
on his heels digging a hole big enough for a clump of 
peonies with a trowel, so no wonder he grunted); “be¬ 
sides, it improves my property to plant perennials; my 
next tenant may appreciate flowers,” he ended, with 
the reproving significance which had become a joke 
between them, 

“Oh,” said Mrs. Richie, sighing, “I don’t like to 
think of that ‘next tenant. ’ ” 

He looked up at her a little startled. “What do you 
mean? You are not going to Philadelphia with David 
next April?” 

“Why, you didn’t suppose I would let David go 
alone?” 

“What! You will leave Mercer?” he said. In his 
dismayed astonishment he dropped his trowel and 
stood up. 


144 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ Will you please tell me why I should stay in Mercer^ 
when David is in Philadelphia?’* 

Robert Ferguson was silent; then he tramped the 
earth in around the roots of the white peony, and said, 
sullenly, “It never occurred to me that you would go, 
too.” 

“You’ll have to be extra nice to Elizabeth when we 
are not here,” Mrs. Richie instructed him. David’s 
mother was very anxious to be nice to Elizabeth herself; 
which was a confession, though she did not know it, 
of her old misgivings as to David’s choice. 

“Be nice? If' said Mr. Ferguson, and snorted; 
“did you ever know me ‘nice’ ?” 

“Always,” she said, smiling. 

But he would not smile; he went back to his garden 
for some more roots; when he returned with a wedge 
taken from his bed of lemon-lilies, he said crossly, “ David 
can manage his own affairs; he doesn’t need apron- 
strings! I think I’ve mentioned that to you before?” 

“I think I recall some such reference,” she admitted, 
her voice trembling with friendly amusement. 

But he went on growling and barking: “Foolish 
woman! to try the experiment at your age, of living in 
a strange place!” 

At that she laughed outright: “That is the nicest way 
in the world to tell a friend you will miss her.” 

Robert Ferguson did not laugh. In fact, as the win¬ 
ter passed and the time drew near for the move to 
be made, nobody laughed very much. Certainly not 
the two young people; since David had left the medical 
school he had worked in Mercer’s infirmary, and now 
they both felt as if the world would end for them when 
they ceased to see each other several times a day. David 
did his best to be cheerful about it; in fact, with that 
common sense of his which his engagement had accentu¬ 
ated, he was almost too cheerful. The hospital service 
would be a great advantage, he said. So great that 


THE IRON WOMAN 


perhaps the three years’ engagement to which they were 
looking forward,—^because David’s finances would prob¬ 
ably not be equal to a wife before that; the three years 
might be shortened to two. But to be parted for two 
years—it was^practically parting, for visits don’t amount 
to anything; “it’s tough,’’ said David. “It’s terrificT* 
Elizabeth said. 

“Oh, well,” David reminded her, “two years is a 
lot better than three.” 

It was curious to see how Love had developed these 
two young creatures: Elizabeth had sprung into swift 
and glowing womanhood; with triumphant candor 
her conduct confessed that she had forgotten every¬ 
thing but Love. She showed her heart to David, and 
to her little world, as freely as a flower that has opened 
overnight—a rose, still wet with dew, that bares a warm 
and fragrant bosom to the sun. David had matured, 
too; but his maturity was of the mind rather than the 
body; manhood suddenly fell upon him like a cloak, and 
because his sense of humor had always been a little 
defective, it was a somewhat heavy cloak, which hid 
and even hampered the spontaneous freedom of youth. 
He was deeply and passionately in love, but his face 
fell into lines of responsibility rather than passion; lines, 
even, of care. He grew markedly older; he thought 
incessantly of how soon he would be able to marry, and 
always in connection with his probable income and his 
possible expenses. Helena Richie was immensely proud 
of this sudden, serious manhood; but Elizabeth’s uncle 
took it as a matter of course;—had he not, himself, 
ceased to be an ass at twenty? Why shouldn’t David 
Richie show some sense at twenty-five! 

As for Elizabeth, she simply adored. Perhaps she 
was, once in a while, a little annoyed at the rather 
ruthless power with which David would calmly override 
some foolish wish of hers; and sometimes there would 
be a gust of temper,—^but it always yielded at his look 
146 


THE IRON WOMAN 


or touch. When he was not near her, when she could 
not see the speechless passion in his eyes, or feel the 
tremor of his lips when they answered the demand of 
hers, then the anger lasted longer. Once or twice, 
when he was away from home, his letters, with their 
laconic taking of her love for granted, made her sharply 
displeased; but when he came back, and kissed her, 
she forgot everything but his arms. Curiously enough, 
the very completeness of her surrender kept him so 
entirely reverent of her that people who did not know 
him might have thought him cold—but Elizabeth knew! 
She knew his love, even when, as she fulminated against 
the misery of being left alone, David merely said, briefly, 
“ Oh, well, two years is a lot better than three.” 

The two years of absence were to begin in April. It 
was in February that Robert Ferguson was told defi¬ 
nitely just when his tenant w’ould terminate her lease; 
he received the news in absolute silence. Mrs. Richie’s 
note came at breakfast; he read it, then went into his 
library and shut the door. He sat down at his writing- 
table, his hands in his pockets, an unlighted cigar be¬ 
tween his teeth. He sat there nearly an hour. Then, 
throwing the cigar into his waste-basket, he knocked 
his glasses off with a bewildered gesture; “Well, I’ll be 
hanged,” he said, softly. It was at that moment that 
he forgave Mrs. Maitland her outrageous joke of more 
than a year before. “I’ve always known that woman 
was no fool,” he said, smiling ruefully at the remem¬ 
brance of his anger at Sarah Maitland’s advice. “It 
was darned good advice!” he said; but he looked posi¬ 
tively dazed. “And I’ve always said I wouldn’t give 
Life the chance to play another trick on me!” he re¬ 
flected; “well, I won’t. This is no silly love-affair; 
it’s good common sense.” Ten minutes later, as he 
started for his office, he caught sight of his face in 
the mirror in the hall. He had lifted one hand to 
take his hat from the rack, but as he suddenly saw 

147 


THE IRON WOMAN 


himself, he stood stock-still, with upraised arm and 
extended fingers; Robert Ferguson had probably not 
been really aware of his reflection in a looking-glass for 
twenty-five years. He saw now a lean, lined, sad face, 
a morose droop of thin and bitter lips; he saw gray 
hair standing up stiffly above a careworn forehead; he 
saw kind, troubled eyes. And as he looked, he frowned. 
“I’m an ugly cuss,” he said to himself, sighing; “and 
I look sixty.” In point of fact, he was nearly fifty. 
“But so is she,” he added, defiantly, and took down 
his hat. “ Only, she looks forty.” And then he thought 
of Mrs. Maitland’s “fair and fifty,” and smiled, in 
spite of himself. “Yes, she is rather good-looking,” 
he admitted. 

And indeed she was; Mrs. Richie’s quiet life with 
her son had kept her forehead smooth, and her eyes— 
eyes the color of a brook which loiters in shady places 
over last year’s leaves — softly clear. There was a 
gentle placidity about her; the curious, shy hesitation, 
the deep, half-frightened sadness, which had been so 
marked when her landlord knew her first, had disap¬ 
peared j sometimes she even showed soft gaieties of 
manner or speech which delighted her moody neighbor 
to the point of making him laugh. And laughing had 
all the charm of novelty to poor Robert Ferguson. “I 
never dreamed of her going away,” he said to himself. 
Well, yes; certainly Mrs. Maitland had some sense, 
after all. When, a week later, blundering and abrupt, 
he referred to Mrs. Maitland’s “sense,” Mrs. Richie 
could not at first understand what he was talking 
about. “She ‘knew more than you gave her credit 
for ’ ? I thought you gave her credit for knowing every¬ 
thing! Oh, you don’t want me to leave Mercer? I 
don’t see the connection. I don’t know everything! 
But you are very flattering, I’m sure. I am a ‘good 
tenant,’ I suppose?” 

“ Please don’t go.” 


148 


THE IRON WOMAN 


She laughed at what she thought was his idea of a 
joke; then said, with half a sigh, that she did not 
know any one in Philadelphia; “when David isn’t at 
home I shall be pretty lonely,” she said. 

“ Please don’t go,” he said again, in a low voice. They 
were sitting before the fire in Mrs. Richie’s parlor; the 
glass doors of the plant-room were open,—^that plant- 
room, which had been his first concession to her; and 
the warm air of the parlor was fragrant with blossoming 
hyacinths. There was a little table between them, with 
a bowl of violets on it, and a big lamp. Robert Ferguson 
rose, and stood with his hands behind him, looking 
down at her. His hair, in a stiff brush above his fore¬ 
head, was quite gray, but his face in its unwonted emo¬ 
tion seemed quivering with youth. He knocked off 
his glasses irritably. “ I never know how to say things,” 
he said, in a low voice; “but—please don’t go.” 

Mrs. Richie stared at him in amazement. 

“ I think we’d better get married,” he said. 

“Mr. Ferguson!” 

“I think I’ve cared about you ever since you came 
here, but I am such a fool I didn’t know it until Mrs. 
Maitland said that absurd thing last fall.” 

“I—I don’t know what you mean!” she parried, 
breathlessly; “at any rate, please don’t say anything 
more about it.” 

“ I have to say something more.” He sat down again 
with the air of one preparing for a siege. “ I’ve got sev¬ 
eral things to say. First, I want to find out my chances ?” 

“You haven’t any.” 

His face moved. He put on his glasses carefully, 
with both hands. “Mrs. Richie, is there any one else? 
If so, I’ll quit. I know you will answer straight; you 
are not like other women. Is there anybody else? That— 
that Old Chester doctor who comes to see you once in a 
while, I understand he’s a widower now; wife’s just 
died; and if—” 


149 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“There is nobody; never anybody.” 

“Ah!” he said, triumphantly; then frowned: “If 
your attachment to your husband makes you say I 
haven’t any chance—but it can’t be that.” 

Her eyes suddenly dilated. “Why not? Why do 
you say it can’t be that?” she said in a frightened voice. 

“I somehow got the impression—forgive me if I am 
saying anything I oughtn’t to; but I had kind of an 
idea that you were not especially happy with him.” 

She was silent. 

“But even if you were,” he went on, “it is so many 
years, I don’t mean to offend you, but a woman isn’t 
faithful to a memory for so many years!” he looked at 
her incredulously;“ not even you, I think.” 

“Such a thing is possible,” she told him coldly; she 
had grown very pale. “But it is not because of—of my 
husband that 1 say I shall never marry again.” 

He interrupted her. “If it isn’t a dead man nor a 
live man that’s ahead of me, then it seems to me you 
can’t say I haven’t any chance—unless I am personally 
offensive to you?” Ihere was an almost child-like 
consternation in his eyes “am I? Of course I know I 
am a bear ” 

“Oh, please don’t say thisngs like that!” she protested. 
“A bear? You? Why, you are just my good, kind 
friend and neighbor; but—” 

“Ah!” he said, “that scared me for a minute! Well, 
when I understood what was the matter with me (I 
didn’t understand until about a week ago), I said to 
myself, ‘ If there’s nobody ahead of me, that woman shall 
be my wife.’ Of course, I am not talking sentimen¬ 
talities to you; we are not David and Elizabeth! I’m 
fifty, and you are not far from it. But I—I—I’m hard 
hit, Mrs. Richie;” his voice trembled, and he twitched 
off his glasses with more than usual ferocity. 

Mrs, Richie rose, “Mr. Ferguson,” she said, gently 
“I ao appreciate the honor you do ma, but—” 

150 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Don’t say a thing like that; it’s foolish,’’ he inter¬ 
rupted, frowning; “v/hat ‘honor’ is it, to a woman like 
you, to have an ugly, bad-mannered fellow like me, 
want you for a wife ? Why, how could I help it! How 
could any man help it ? I don’t know what Dr. King 
is thinking of, that he isn’t sitting on your doorsteps 
waiting for a chance to ask you! I ought to have 
asked you long ago. I can’t imagine why I didn’t, 
except that I supposed we would go on always living 
next door to each other. And—and I thought any¬ 
thing like this, was over for me. . . . Mrs. Richie, please 
sit down, and let me finish what I have to say.’’ 

“There is no use, Mr. Ferguson,” she said; but she 
sat down, her face falling into Hnes of sadness that made 
her look curiously old. 

“There isn’t anybody ahead of me: so far, so good. 
Now as to my chances; of course I realize that I haven’t 
any,—^to-day. But there’s to-morrow, Mrs. Richie; 
and the day after to-morrow. There’s next week, and 
next year;—and I don’t change. Look how slow I was 
in finding out that I wanted you; it’s taken me all these 
years! What a poor, dull fool I am! Well, I know it 
now; and you know it; and you don’t personally dislike 
me. So perhaps some day,” his harsh face was sud¬ 
denly almost beautiful; “ some day you’ll be —my wife !'* 
he said, under his breath. He had no idea that he was 
“talking sentimentalities”; he would have said he did 
not know how to be sentimental. But his voice was the 
voice of youth and passion. 

She shook her head. “No,” she said, quietly; “I 
can’t marry you, Mr. Ferguson.” 

“But you are generally so reasonable,” he protested, 
astonished and wistful; “why, it seems to me that you 
must be willing—after a while ? Here we are, two people 
getting along in years, and our children have made a 
match of it; and we are used to each other, that’s a 
very important thing in marriage. It’s just plain com- 
i.-ii 


THE IRON WOMAN 


mon sense, after David is on his own legs in the hospital, 
for us to join forces. Perhaps in the early summer? 
I won’t be unreasonably urgent. Surely”—he was 
gaining confidence from his own words—“surely you 
must see how sensible—” 

Involuntarily, perhaps through sheer nervousness, 
she laughed. “ Mrs. Maitland’s ‘ sensible arrangement ’ ? 
No, Mr. Ferguson; please let us forget all about this—” 

He gave his snort of a laugh. “Forget? Now that 
isn’t sensible. No, you dear, foolish woman; whatever 
else we do, we shall neither of us forget this. This is 
one of the things a man and woman don’t forget;” in his 
earnestness he pushed aside the bowl of violets on the 
table between them, and caught her hand in both of his. 
“I’m going to get you yet,” he said, he was as eager 
as a boy. 

Before she could reply, or even draw back, David 
opened the parlor door, and stood aghast on the thresh¬ 
old. It was impossible to mistake the situation. The 
moment of sharp withdrawal between the two on either 
side of the table announced it, without the uttering of 
a word; David caught his breath. Robert Ferguson 
could have wrung the intruder’s neck, but Mrs. Richie 
clutched at her son’s presence with a gasp of relief: 
“ Oh—David! I thought you were next door! ” 

“I was,” David said, briefly; “I came in to get a 
book for Elizabeth.” 

“We were—talking,” Mrs. Richie said, trying to 
laugh. Mr. Ferguson, standing with his back to the 
fire, was slowly putting on his glasses. “But we had 
finished our discussion,” she ended breathlessly. 

“For the moment,” Mr. Ferguson said, significantly; 
and set his jaw. 

“Well, David, have you and Elizabeth decided when 
she is to come and see us in Philadelphia?” Mrs. Richie 
asked, her voice still trembling. 

“She says she’ll come East whenever Mr. Ferguson can 

152 


THE IRON WOMAN 


bring her,” David said, rummaging among the books on 
the table. “But it’s a pity to wait as long as that,” 
he added, and the hint in his words was inescapable. 

Robert Ferguson did not take hints. “ I think I can 
manage to come pretty soon,” he retorted. 


CHAPTER XIII 


When Mr. Ferguson said good night, David, appar> 
ently unable to find the book he had promised to take 
in to Elizabeth, made no effort to help his mother in her 
usual small nightly tasks of blowing out the lamps, 
tidying the table, folding up a newspaper or two. This 
was not like David, but Mrs. Richie was too absorbed to 
notice her son’s absorption. Just as she was starting 
up-stairs, he burst out: “ Materna—” 

“Yes? What is it?” 

Pie gave her a keenly searching look; then drew a 
breath of relief, and kissed her. “Nothing,” he said. 

But later, as he lay on his back in bed, his hands 
clasped behind his head, his pipe between his teeth, 
David was distinctly angry. “Of course she doesn’t 
care a hang for him,” he reflected; “I could see that; 
but I swear I’ll go to Philadelphia right off.” Before 
he slept he had made up his mind that was the best 
thing to do. That that old man, gray and granite-faced, 
and silent, “that old codger,” said the disrespectful cub 
of twenty-six, “ should take advantage of friendship to be 
a nuisance,—confound him!” said David. “The idea 
of his daring to make love to her! I wanted to show 
him the door.” As for his mother, even if she didn’t 
“care a hang,” he was half shocked, half hurt; he felt, 
as all young creatures do, a curious repulsion at the idea 
of love-making between people no longer young. It 
hurt his delicacy, it almost hurt his sense of reverence 
for his mother, to think that she had been obliged to 
listen to any words of love. “It’s offensive,” he said 

154 


THE IRON WOMAN 


angrily; “yes; we’ll clear out! We’ll go to Philadelphia 
the first of March, instead of April.’’ 

The next morning he suggested his plan to his mother. 
“Could you pack up in three weeks, Materna?” he said; 
“I think I’d like to get you settled before I go to the 
hospital.” Mrs. Richie’s instant acceptance of the 
change of date made him more annoyed than ever. 
“He has worried her!” he thought angrily; “I wonder 
how long this thing has been going on?” But he said 
nothing to her. Nor did he mean to explain to Eliza¬ 
beth just why he must shorten their last few weeks of 
being together. It would not be fair to his mother to 
explain, he said to himself;—he did not think of any 
unfairness to the “old codger.” He was, however, a 
little uneasy at the prospect of breaking the fact of this 
earlier departure to Elizabeth without an explanation. 
Elizabeth might be hurt; she might say that he didn’t 
want to stay with her. “She knows better!” he said 
to himself, grinning. The honest truth v/as, and he 
faced it with placidity, that if things were not explained 
to Elizabeth, she might get huffy,—this was David’s 
word; but David knew how to check that “huffiness”! 

They were to walk together that afternoon, and he 
manoeuvered for a few exquisite minutes alone before 
they went out. At first the moments were not very 
exquisite. 

“Well! What happened to you last night? I thought 
you were going to bring me that book!” 

“ I couldn’t. I had to stay at home.’* 

“Why?” 

“Well; Materna wanted me.” 

Elizabeth murmured a small, cold “Oh.” Then she 
said, “ Why didn’t you send the book in by Uncle?” 

“ I didn’t think of it,” David said candidly. 

Elizabeth’s dimple straightened. “It would have 
been polite to have sent me a message.” 

“ I took it for granted you’d know I was detained.” 

155 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“\ou take too much for—” she began, but before she 
could utter the sharp words that trembled on her lips, 
he caught her in his arms and kissed her: instantly the 
little flame of temper was blown out. 

“That’s the worst of walking,” David said, as she let 
him draw her down on the sofa beside him; “ I can’t kiss 
you on the street.” 

“Heavens, I should hope not!” she said. Then, for¬ 
getting what she thought was his forgetfulness, she re¬ 
laxed within his arms, sighing with bliss. “‘Oh, isn’t 
it joyful,—joyful,—^joyful—’” she hummed softly. “I 
do love to have you put your arms around me, David! 
Isn’t tt wonderful to love each other the way we do ? 
I feel so sorry for other girls, because they aren’t engaged 
to you; poor things! Do you suppose anybody in the 
world was ever as happy as I am?” 

''You?'* said David, scornfully; “you don’t count at 
all, compared to me!” Then they both laughed for the 
sheer foolishness of that “joyfulness,” which was so 
often on Elizabeth’s lips. But David sighed. “Three 
7 ears is a devilish long time to wait.” 

“Maybe it will be only two!” she whispered, her soft 
lips against his ear. But this was one of David’s prac¬ 
tical and responsible moments, so he said grimly, “Not 
much hope of that.” 

Elizabeth, agreeing sadly, got up to straighten her 
hat before the mirror over the mantelpiece. “It’s 
hideously long. Oh, if I were only a rich girl!” 

“Thank Heaven you are not!” he said, with such 
sudden cold incisiveness that she turned round and 
looked at him. “Do you think I’d marry a rich wo¬ 
man, and let her support me?” 

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t, if she loved you,” 
Elizabeth said calmly; “I don’t see that it matters 
which has the money, the man or the girl.” 

“I see,” David said; “I’ve always felt that way— 
even about mother. Matema has wanted to help me 


THE IRON WOMAN 


out lots of times, and I wouldn’t let her. I could kick 
myself now when I think how often I have to put my 
hand in her pocket.” 

“I think,” cried Elizabeth, “a man might love a girl 
enough to live on her money!” 

“I don’t,” David said, soberly. 

“V/ell,” said Elizabeth, “don’t worry. I haven’t a 
cent, so you can’t put your hand in my pocket! Come, 
we must start. I want to go and see Nannie for a 
minute, and Cherry-pie says I must be in before dark, 
because I have a cold.” 

“I like sitting here best,” David confessed, but pulled 
himself up from the sofa, and in another minute Miss 
White, peering from an upper window, saw them walking 
off. “Made for each other!” said Cherry-pie, nibbling 
with happiness. 

They had almost reached Nannie’s before David said 
that—that he was afraid he would have to go away a 
month before he had planned. When he was most in 
earnest, his usual brevity of speech fell into a curtness 
that might have seemed, to one who did not know him, 
indifference. Elizabeth did know him, but even to her the 
ensuing explanation, which did not explain, was, through 
his very anxiety not to offend her, provokingly laconic. 

“ But you don’t go on duty at the hospital until April,” 
she said hotly. “Why do you leave Mercer the first of 
March?” 

“Matema wants time to get settled.” 

“Mrs. Richie told me only yesterday that she was 
going to a hotel,” Elizabeth said; “she said she wasn’t 
going to look for a house until the fall, because she will 
be at the seashore this summer. It certainly doesn’t 
take a month to find a hotel.” 

“Well, the fact is, there are reasons why it isn’t pleas¬ 
ant for Matema to be in Mercer just now.” 

“Not pleasant to be in Mercer! What on earth do 
you mean?” 


157 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ I’m afraid I can’t tell you. It’s her affair.’^ 

“ Oh, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Elizabeth saia 
coldly. 

“Now, Elizabeth,” he protested, “that isn’t a nice 
thing to say.’‘ 

“Do you think you've been saying nice things? I am 
perfectly certain that you would never hesitate to tell 
your mother any of my reasons for doing things!” 

“Elizabeth, I wouldn’t leave Mercer a minute before 
the first of April, if I wasn’t sure it was best for Matema. 
You know that.” 

“Oh, go!” she said; “go, and have all the secrets you 
want. I don’t care.” 

“Elizabeth, be reasonable; I—” 

But she had left him; they had reached the Maitland 
house, and, pushing aside his outstretched hand, she 
opened the iron gate herself, slammed it viciously, and 
ran up the curving steps to the door. As she waited 
for Harris to answer her ring, she looked back: “I 
think you are reasonable enough for both of us; please 
don’t let me ever interfere with your plans!” She 
paused a minute in the hall, listening for a following 
step;—it did not come. “Well, if he’s cross he can 
stay outside!” she told herself, and burst into the par¬ 
lor. “Nannie!” she began,—“Oh, I beg your par¬ 
don!” she said. Blair was standing on the hearth-rug, 
talking vehemently to his sister; at the sound of the 
opening door he wheeled around and saw her, glowing, 
wounded, and amazingly handsome. “Elizabeth!” he 
said, staring at her. And he kept on staring while they 
shook hands. They were a handsome pair, the tall, 
dark, well-set-up man, and the girl almost as tall as he, 
with brown, gilt-flecked hair blowing about a vivid face 
which had the color, in the sharp February afternoon, of 
a blush-rose. 

“Where’s David?” Nannie said. 

“ I left him at the gate. He’s coming in in a minute,” 
158 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Elizabeth said; and turned to Blair: ‘'I didn’t know you 
had come home.” 

Blair explained that he was only in Mercer for a day. 
“I’m in a hole,” he said drolly, “and I’ve come home 
to have Nannie get me out.” 

“Nannie is always ready to get people out of holes;” 
Elizabeth said, but her voice was vague. She was 
listening for David’s step, her cheeks beginning to burn 
with mortification at his delay. 

“Where is David?” Nannie demanded, returning 
from a fruitless search for him in the hall. 

“He’s a lucky dog,” Blair said, looking at the charm¬ 
ing, angry face with open and friendly admiration. 

Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know 
about his luck. By the way, he is going to Philadelphia 
the first of March, Nannie,” she said carelessly. 

“I thought he didn’t have to go until April?” Nannie 
sympathized. 

“ So did I. Perhaps he’ll tell you why he has changed 
his mind. He hasn’t deigned to give me. his reasons 
yet.” 

And Blair, watching her, said to himself, “Same old 
Elizabeth!” He began to talk to her in his gay, teasing 
way, but she was not listening; suddenly she interrupted 
him, saying that she must go home. “I thought David 
was coming in, but I suppose he’s walking up and down, 
waiting for me.” 

“If he doesn’t know which side his bread is buttered, 
ril walk home with you,” Blair said; “and Nancy dear, 
while I’m gone, you see Mother and do your best, won’t 
you?” 

“Yes,” poor Nannie sighed, “ but I do wish—” 

Blair did not wait to hear what she wished; he had 
eyes only for this self-absorbed young creature who 
would not listen when he spoke to her. At the gate she 
hesitated, looked hurriedly about her, up and down the 
squalid street; she did not answer, did not apparently 

11 "59 


THE IRON WOMAN 


hear, some question that he asked. Blair glanced up 
and down the street, too. “David doesn’t appreciate 
his opportunities,” he said. 

Elizabeth’s lip tightened, and she flung up her head, 
the rose in her cheeks was drowned in scarlet. She 
came out of her absorption, and began to sparkle at her 
companion; she teased him, but not too much; she flat¬ 
tered him, very delicately; she fell into half'•sentimental 
reminiscences that made him laugh, then stabbed him 
gently with an indifferent word that showed how entirely 
she had forgotten him. And all the time her eyes were 
absent, and the straight line in her cheek held the dimple 
a prisoner. Blair, who had begun with a sort of good- 
natured, rather condescending amusement at his old 
playmate, found himself, to his surprise, on his mettle. 

“Don’t go home yet,” he said; “let’s take a walk.” 

“Td love to!” 

“Mercer seems to be just as hideous as ever,” Blair 
said; “suppOvSe we go across the river, and get away 
from it?” 

She agreed lightly: “Horrid place.” At the comer, 
she flashed a glance down the side street; David was 
not to be seen. 

“ Will David practise here, when he is ready to put out 
his' shingle?” 

“I’msure I don’t know. I can’t keep track of David’s 
plans.” 

“He is just as good as ever, I suppose?” Blair said, 
and watched her delicate lip droop. 

“Better, if anything.” And in the dusk, as they 
sauntered over the old bridge, she flung out gibe after 
gibe at her lover. Her cheeks grew hotter and hotter; 
it was like tearing her own flesh. The shame of it! The 
rapture of it! It hurt her so that the tears stood in her 
eyes, so she did it again, and yet again. “I don’t pre¬ 
tend to live up to David,” she said. 

Blair, with a laugh, confessed that he had long ago 

i6o 


THE IRON WOMAN 


given up any such ambition himself. On the bridge 
they stopped, and Blair looked back at the town lying 
close to the water. In the evening dusk lights were 
pricking out all along the shore; the waste-lands beyond 
the furnaces were vague with night mists, faintly 
amethyst in the east, bronze and black over the city. 
Here and there in the brown distances flames would 
suddenly burst out from unseen stacks, then sink, and 
the shadows close again. 

“I wish I could paint it,’’ Blair said dreamily; “Mer¬ 
cer from the bridge, at twilight, is really beautiful.” 

“I like the bridge,” Elizabeth said, “for sentimental 
reasons. (Now,” she added to herself, “now, I am a 
bad woman; to speak of that to another man is vile.) 
David and I,” she said, significantly,—and laughed. 

Even Blair was startled at the crudeness of the allu¬ 
sion. “ I didn’t suppose David ever condescended to be 
spoony,” he said, and at the same instant, to his absolute 
amazement, she caught his arm and pulled his hand 
from the railing. 

“Don’t touch that place!” she cried; Blair, amused 
and cynical, laughed under his breath. 

“I see; this is the hallowed spot where you made 
our friend a happy man?” 

“We’ll turn back now, please,” Elizabeth said, sud¬ 
denly trembling. She had reached the climax of her 
anger, and the reaction was like the shock of dropping 
from a dizzy height. During the walk home she scarcely 
spoke. When he left her at her uncle’s door, she was 
almost rude. “Goodnight. No; I’m busy. I’d rather 
you didn’t come in.” In her own room, without waiting 
to take off her things, she ran to her desk; she did not 
even pause to sit down, but bent over, and wrote, sobbing 
under her breath: 

“David: I am just as false as I can be. I ridiculed 
you to Blair. I lied and lied and lied—^because I was 

i6i 


THE IRON WOMAN 


angry, I hated you for a little while. I am low, and 
vulgar, and a blasphemer. I told him about the bridge. 
You see how vile I am.'* But don’t—don’t give me up, 
David. Only — understand just how base I am, and 
then, if you possibly can, keep on loving me. E. 

“ P. S. I am not worth loving.” 

When David read that poor little letter, his face quiv¬ 
ered for an instant, then he smiled. “Materna,” he 
said—they were sitting at supper; “Matema, she cer¬ 
tainly is perfect!” 

His mother laughed, and put out her hand. But he 
shook his head. “Not even you!” he said. 

When he went to see Elizabeth that evening, he found 
her curiously broken. “David, how could I do it.? 
I madeof you! Do you understand ? Yes; I truly 
did. Oh, how vile I am! And I knew I was vile all the 
time; that’s the queer part of it. But I piled it on! 
And all the time it seemed as if I was just bleeding to 
death inside. But I kept on doing it. I loved being 
false. I loved to blacken myself.” She drew away 
from him, shivering. “No; don’t touch me; don’t kiss 
me; I am not worthy. Oh, David, throw me over! 
Don’t marry me, I am not fit—” And as he caught her 
in his arms, she said, her voice smothered against his 
breast, “You see, you didn’t come in at Nannie’s. 
And it looked as if—as if you didn’t care. It was hu¬ 
miliating, David. And last night you didn’t bring me 
the book, or even send any message; and that was sort 
of careless. Yes, I really think you were a little horrid, 
David. So I was hurt, I suppose, to start with; and you 
know, when I am hurt— Oh, yes; it was silly; but—” 

He kissed her again, and laughed. “It was silly, 
dear.” 

“Well, but listen: I am not excusing myself for this 
afternoon, but I do want you to understand how it 
started. I was provoked at your not explaining to me 
162 



I THINK YOU ARE REASONABLE ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US.” Page 158. 

—The lion Woman 




















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THE IRON WOMAN 


why you go away a whole month earlier than you need; 
I think any girl would be a little provoked, David. And 
then, on top of it, you let Blair and Nannie see that you 
didn’t care to walk home with me, and—” 

“But good gracious!” said David, amused and tender, 
“I thought you didn’t want me! And it would have 
been rather absurd to hang round, if I wasn’t wanted.” 

“Oh,” she cried, sharply, lifting her wet face from his 
breast, “ don’t you see ? / want you to he absurd! Can’t 

you understand how a girl feels?” She stopped, and 
sighed. “After all, why should you show Nannie and 
Blair that you care ? Why should you wait ? I am not 
worth caring for, or waiting for, anywhere, any time! 
Oh, David, my temper—my dreadful temper!” 

He lifted her trembling hand and kissed the scar on 
her left wrist silently. 

“I ought not to see you to-night, just to punish my¬ 
self,” she said brokenly. “You don’t know how crazy I 
was when I was talking to Blair. I was crazy! Oh, why, 
when I was a child, didn’t they make me control my 
temper? I suppose I’m like—my mother,” she ended in 
a whisper. “And I can’t change, now; I’m too old.” 

David smiled. “ You are terribly old,” he said. Like 
everybody else, save Mrs. Richie, David accepted Eliza¬ 
beth’s temper as a matter of course. “She doesn’t 
mean anything by it,” her little world had always said; 
and put up with the inconvenience of her furies, with the 
patience of people who were themselves incapable of the 
irrationalities of temper. “Oh, you are a hardened 
sinner,” David mocked. 

“You do forgive me?” she whispered. 

At that he was grave. “There is nothing I wouldn’t 
forgive, Elizabeth.” 

“But I have stabbed you?” 

“ Yes; a little; but I am yours to stab.” 

Her eyes filled. “Oh, it is so wonderful, that you go 
on loving me, David!” 

163 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“You go on loving me,“ he rallied her; “in spiteot 
my dullness and slowness, and all that.’* 

But Elizabeth was not listening. “Sometimes it 
frightens me to get so angry,” she said, with a somber 
look. “It was just the same when I was a little girl; 
do you remember the time I cut off my hair? I think 
you had hurt my feehngs; I forget now what you had 
done. I was always having my feelings hurt! Of course 
I was awfully silly. It was a relief then to spoil my 
body, by cutting off my hair. This afternoon it was a 
relief to put mud on my soul.” 

He looked at her, trying to find words tender enough 
to heal the wounds she had tom in her own heart; not 
finding them, he was silent. 

“Oh, we must face it,” she said; '"you must face it. 
I am not a good gin; I am not the kind of girl you 
ought to marry, I’m perfectly sure your mother thinks 
so. She thinks a person with a temper can’t love people.” 

“I’ll not go away in March!” David interrupted her 
passionately;—of course it might be pleasanter for Ma- 
terna to get away from old Ferguson; but what is a man’s 
mother, compared with his girl! Elizabeth’s pain was 
intolerable to him. “I won’t leave you a day before I 
have to!” 

For a moment her wet eyes smiled. “Indeed you 
shall; I may be wicked—oh, I am! but I am not really 
an idiot. Only, David, don't take things so for granted^ 
dear; and don’t be so awfully sensible, David.” 


CHAPTER XIV 


When the door closed behind Blair and Elizabeth, 
Nannie set out to do that “best,” which her brother had 
demanded of her. She went at once into the dining¬ 
room; but before she could speak, her stepmother 
called out to her: 

“Here! Nannie! You are just the person I want— 
Watson’s late again, and I’m in a hurry. Just take these 
letters and sign them ‘S. Maitland per N. M.’ They 
must be posted before five. Sit down there at the 
table.” 

Nannie could not sign letters and talk at the same 
time. She got pen and ink and began to write her step¬ 
mother’s name, over and over, slowly, like a little care¬ 
ful machine: “S. Maitland,” “S. Maitland.” In her 
desire to please she discarded her own neat script, and 
reproduced with surprising exactness the rough signa¬ 
ture which she knew so well. But all the while her 
anxious thoughts were with her brother. She wished 
he had not rushed off with Elizabeth. If he had only 
come himself into the detested dining-room, his mother 
would have bidden him sign the letters; he might have 
read them and talked them over with her, and that 
would have pleased her. Nannie herself had no am¬ 
bition to read them; her eye caught occasional phrases: 
“Shears for—,” “new converter,” etc., etc. The words 
meant nothing to Nannie, bending her blond head and 
writing like a machine, “ S. Maitland,” “ S. Maitland.. .. 

“Mamma,” she began, dipping her pen into the ink, 
“ Blair has bought a rather expensive— 

165 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Mrs. Maitland came over to the table and picked up 
the letters. “That’s all. Now clear out, clear out! 
I’ve got a lot to do!” Then her eye fell on one of the 
signatures, and she gave her grunt of a laugh. “ If you 
hadn’t put ‘Per N. M.,’ I shouldn’t have known that I 
hadn’t signed ’em myself . . . Nannie.” 

“Yes, Mamma?” 

“ Is Blair going to be at home to supper?” 

“ I think not. But he said he would be in this even¬ 
ing, And he wanted me to—^to ask—” 

“Well, perhaps I’ll come over to your parlor to see 
him, if I get through with my work. I believe he goes 
East again to-morrow?” 

“Yes,” Nannie said. Mrs. Maitland, at her desk, 
had begun to write. Nannie wavered for a minute, 
then, with a despairing look at the back of her step¬ 
mother’s head, slipped away to her own part of the 
house. “I’ll tell her at supper,” she promised herself. 
But in her own room, as she dressed for tea, panic fell 
upon her. She began to walk nervously about; once she 
stopped, and leaning her forehead against the window, 
looked absently into the dusk. At the end of the cinder 
path, the vast pile of the foundry rose black against the 
fading sky; on the left the open arches of the cast-house 
of the furnace glowed with molten iron that was running 
into pigs on the wide stretch of sand. The spur track 
was banked with desolate wastes of slag and rubbish; 
beyond them, like an enfolding arm, was the river, dark 
in the darkening twilight. From under half-shut dam¬ 
pers flat sheets of sapphire and orange flame roared 
oat in rhythmical pulsations, and above them was the 
pillar of smoke shot through with flying billions of 
sparks; back of this monstrous and ordered confusion 
was the solemn circling line of hills. It was all hideous 
and fierce, yet in the clear winter dusk it had a beauty 
of its own that held Nannie Maitland, even though she 
was too accustomed to it to be conscious of its details, 

i66 


THE IRON WOMAN 


As she stared out at it with troubled eyes, there was a 
knock at her door; before she could say “Come in,** 
her stepmother entered. 

“Here!” Mrs. Maitland said, “just fix this waist, will 
you? I can’t seem to—to make it look right.” There 
was a dull flush on her cheek, and she spoke in cross con¬ 
fusion. “Haven’t you got a piece of lace, or something; 
I don’t care what. This black dress seems—” she broke 
off and glanced into the mirror; she was embarrassed, 
but doggedly determined. “Make me look—some¬ 
how,” she said. 

Nannie, assenting, and rummaging in her bureau 
drawer, had a flash of understanding. “She’s dressing 
up for Blair!” She took out a piece of lace, and laid 
it about the gaunt shoulders; then tucked the front 
of the dress in, and brought the lace down on each side. 
The soft old thread seemed as inappropriate as it would 
have been if laid on a scarcely cooled steel “bloom.” 

“Well, pin it, can’t you?” Mrs. Maitland said sharply; 
“haven’t you got some kind of a brooch?” Nannie 
silently produced a little amethyst pin. 

“It doesn’t just suit the dress, I’m afraid,” she ven¬ 
tured. 

But Mrs. Maitland looked in the glass complacently. 
“Nonsense!” she said, and tramped out of the room. 
In the hall she threw back, “—bliged.” 

“Oh, poor Mamma!” Nannie said. Her sympathy 
was hardly more than a sense of relief; if her mother 
was dressing up for Blair, she must be more than usually 
good-natured. “I’ll tell her at supper,” Nannie decided, 
with a lift of courage. 

But at supper, in the disorderly dining-room, with the 
farther end of the table piled with ledgers, Mrs. Maitland 
was more unapproachable than ever. When Nannie 
asked a timid question about the evening, she either did 
not hear, or she affected not to. At any rate, she vouch¬ 
safed no answer. Her face was still red, and she seemed 

167 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to hide behind her evening paper. To Nannie’s gentle 
dullness this was no betrayal; it merely meant that Mrs. 
Maitland was cross again, and her heart sank within her. 
But somehow she gathered up her courage: 

“You won’t forget to come into the parlor, Mamma? 
Blair wants to talk to you about something that—that—” 

“I’ve got some writing to do. If I get through I’ll 
come. Now clear out, clear out; I’m too busy to chat¬ 
ter.’’ 

Nannie cleared out. She had no choice. She went 
over to her vast, melancholy parlor, into which it seemed 
as if the fog had penetrated, to await Blair. In her rest¬ 
less apprehension she sat down at the piano, but after 
the first bar or two her hands dropped idly on the keys. 
Then she got up and looked aimlessly about. “I’d bet¬ 
ter finish that landscape,” she said, and went over to her 
drawing-board. She stood there for a minute, fingering 
a lead pencil; her nerves were tense, and yet, as she 
reminded herself, it was foolish to be frightened. His 
mother loved Blair; she would do anything in the world 
for him—Nannie thought of the lace; yes, anything! 
Blair was only a little extravagant. And what did his 
extravagance matter? his mother was so very rich! 
But oh, why did they always clash so ? Then she heard 
the sound of Blair’s key in the lock. 

“Well, Nancy!” he said gaily, “she’s a charmer.” 

“Who?” said Nannie, bewildered; “Oh, you mean 
Elizabeth?” 

“Yes; but there’s a lot of gunpowder lying round 
loose, isn’t there? She was out with David, I suppose 
because he didn’t show up. In fact, she was so mad 
she was perfectly stunning. Nancy! I think I’ll 
stick it out here for +wo or three days; Elizabeth is 
mighty good fun, and David is in town; we might 
renew our youth, we four; what do you say? Well!’* 
he ended, coming back to his own affairs., “what dia 
mother say?” 


i68 


THE IRON WOMAN 


^‘Oh, Blair, I couldn’t!” 

“ What 1 you haven’t told her ?” 

“ Blair dear, I did my best; but she simply never gave 
me a chance. Indeed, I tried, but I couldn’t. She 
wouldn’t let me open my lips in the afternoon, and at 
supper she read the paper every minute—Harris will tell 
you.” 

Blair Maitland whistled. “Well, I’ll tell her myself. 
It was really to spare her that I wanted you to do it. 
I always rile her, somehow, poor dear mother. Nannie, 
this house reeks of cabbage! Does she live on it?” 
Blair threw up his arms with a wordless gesture of dis¬ 
gust. 

“I’m so sorry,” Nannie said; “but don’t tell her you 
don’t like it.” 

The door across the hall opened, and there was a 
heavy step. The brother and sister looked at each other. 

“ Blair, he niceT' Nannie entreated; her soft eyes under 
the meekly parted blond hair were very anxious. 

He did not need the caution; whenever he was with 
his mother, the mere instinct of self-preservation made 
him anxious to “be nice.” As Mrs. Maitland had her 
instinct of self-preservation, too, there had been, in the 
last year, very few quarrels. Instead there was, on his 
part, an exaggerated politeness, and on her part, a 
pathetic effort to be agreeable. The result was, of 
course, entire absence of spontaneity in both of them. 

Mrs. Maitland, her knitting in her hands, came tramp¬ 
ing into the parlor; the piece of thread lace was pushed 
awry, but there had been further preparation for the 
occasion: at first her son and daughter did not know 
what the change was; then suddenly both recognized it, 
and exchanged an astonished glance. 

“Mother!” cried Blair incredulously, ''earringsF' 

The dull color on the high cheek-bones deepened; 
she smiled sheepishly. “Yes; I saw ’em in my bureau 
drawer, and put ’em on. Haven’t worn ’em for years’ 

i6g 


THE IRON WOMAN 


but Blair, here, likes pretty things.” (Her son, under 
his breath, groaned: “pretty!”) “So you are off to¬ 
morrow, Blair?” she said, politely; she ran her hand 
along the yellowing bone needles, and the big ball of 
pink worsted rolled softly down on to the floor. As she 
glanced at him over her steel-rimmed spectacles, her 
eyes softened as an eagle’s might when looking at her 
young. “I wish his father could see him,” she thought. 
“Next time you come home,” she said, “it will be to go 
to work!” 

“Yes,” Blair said, smiling industriously. 

“Pity you have to study this summer; I’d like to 
have you in the office now.” 

“Yes; I’m awfully sorry,” he said with charming 
courtesy, “but I feel I ought to brush up on one or two 
subjects, and I can do it better abroad than here. I’m 
going to paint a little, too. I’ll be very busy all sum¬ 
mer.” 

“Why don’t you paint our new foundry?” said Mrs. 
Maitland. She laughed with successful cheerfulness; 
Blair liked jokes, and this, she thought, complacently^ 
was a joke. “Well, I shall manage to keep busy,too!” 
she said. 

“I suppose so,” Blair agreed. 

He was lounging on the arm of Nannie’s chair, and 
felt his sleeve plucked softly. “Now,” said Nannie. 

But Blair was not ready. “You are always busy,” 
he said; “ I wish I had your habiv of industry.” 

Mrs. Maitland’s smile faded. I wish you had.” 

“ Oh, well, you’ve got industry enough for this family,” 
Blair declared. But the flattery did not penetrate. 

“Too much, maybe,” she said grimly; then remem¬ 
bered, and began to “entertain” again: “I had a com¬ 
pliment to-day.” 

Blair, with ardent interest, said, “Really?” 

“That man Dolliver in our office—you remember 
Dolliver?” Blair nodded. “He happened to say he 

170 


THE IRON WOMAN 


never knew such an honest man as old Henry B. Knight. 
Remember old Mr. Knight?” She paused, her eyes 
narrowed into a laugh. “He married Molly Wharton. 
I always called her ‘goose Molly.' She used to make 
eyes at your father; but she couldn’t get him—though 
she tried to hard enough, by telling him, so I heard, that 
the ‘only feminine thing about me was my petticoats.’ 
A very coarse remark, in my judgment; and as for being 
feminine,—when you were born, I thought of inviting her 
to come and look at you so she could see what a baby 
was like! She never had any children. Well, old Knight 
was elder of the Second Church. Remember?” 

“Oh yes,” Blair said vaguely. 

“Dolliver said Knight once lost a trade by telling the 
truth, ‘when he might have kept his mouth shut'—^that 
was Dolliver's way of putting it. ‘Well,' I said, ‘I hope 
you think that our Works are just as honestly conducted 
as the Knight Mills ’; fact was, I knew a thing or two 
about Henry B. And what do you suppose Dolliver 
said ? ‘Oh, yes,' he said, ‘you are honest, Mrs. Maitland, 

but you ain’t damn-fool honest.’” She laughed loudly, 
and her son laughed too, this time in genuine amusement; 
but Nannie looked prim, at which Mrs. Maitland glanced 
at Blair, and there was a sympathetic twinkle between 
them which for the moment put them both really at 
ease. “I got on to a good thing last week,” she said, 
still trying to amuse him, but now there was reality in 
her voice. 

“Do tell me about it,” Blair said, politely. 

“ You know Kraas ? He is the man that’s had a bee in 
his bonnet for the last ten years about a newfangled 
idea for making castings of steel. He brought me his 
plans once, but I told him they were no good. But last 
month he asked me to make some castings for him to go 
on his contrivance. Of course I did; we cast anything 
for anybody—provided they can pay for it. Well, Kraas 
tried it in our foundry: no good, just as I said; the metal 
I7I 


THE IRON WOMAN 


was full of flaws. But it occurred to me to experiment 
with his idea on my own hook. I melted my pig, and 
poured it into his converter thing; but I added some 
silvery pig I had on the Yard, made when No. i blew in, 
and the castings were as sound as a nut! Kraas never 
thought of that.*' She twitched her pink worsted and 
gave her grunt of a laugh. “Master Kraas hasn*t any 
caveat, and he can’t get one on that idea, so of course I 
can go ahead.” 

“Oh, Mamma, how clever you are!” Nannie mur¬ 
mured, admiringly. 

“Clever?” said Blair; Nannie shook his arm gently, 
and he recollected himself. “Well, I suppose business 
is like love and war. All’s fair in business.” 

Mrs. Maitland was silentc Then she said: “Business 
is war. But—fair? It is a perfectly legal thing to 
do.” 

“Oh, legal, yes,” her son agreed significantly; the 
thin ice of politeness w’’as beginning to crack. It was 
the old situation over again; he was repelled by unloveli¬ 
ness; this time it was the unloveliness of shrewdness. 
For a moment his disgust made him quite natural, “ It 
is legal enough, I suppose,” he said coldly. 

Mrs. Maitland did not lift her head, bfit with her eyes 
fixed on her needles, she suddenly stopped knitting. 
Nannie quivered, 

“Mamma,” she burst in, “Blair wanted to tell you 
about something very beautiful that he has found, 
and—” Her brother pinched her, and her voice trailed 
into silence. 

“Found something beautiful? I’d like to hear of his 
finding something useful!” The ice cracked a little 
more. “ As for your mother’s honesty, Blair, if you had 
waited a minute, I’d have told you that as soon as I 
found the idea was practical I handed it over to Kraas. 
Pm damn-fool honest, I suppose.” But this tim.e she 
did not laugh at her joke. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Blair was instant with apologies; he had not meant— 
he had not intended—• “Of course you would do the 
square thing,” he declared. 

“But you thought I wouldn’t,” she said. And while 
he was making polite exclamations, she changed the 
subject for something safer. She still tried to entertain 
him, but now she spoke wearily. “ What do you suppose 
I read in the paper to-night ? Some man in New York— 
named Maitland, curiously enough; ‘picked up’ an old 
master—^that’s how the paper put it; for $5,000. It 
appears it was considered ‘ cheap ’! It was 14x18 inches. 
Inches, mind you, not feet! Well, Mr. Doestick’s friends 
are not all dead yet. Sorry anybody of our name should 
do such a thing.” 

Nannie turned white enough to faint. 

“Allow me to say,” said Blair, tensely, “that an ‘old 
master’ might be cheap at five times that price!” 

“ I wouldn’t give five thousand dollars for the greatest 
picture that was ever painted,” his mother announced. 
Then, without an instant’s warning, her face puckered 
into a furious sneeze. “God bless us!” she said, and 
blew her nose loudly. Blair jumped. 

“/ would give all I have in the world!” he said. 

“Well,” his mother said, ramming her grimy hand¬ 
kerchief into her pocket, “if it cost all you have in the 
world, it would certainly be cheap; for, so far as I know, 
you haven’t anything.” Alas! the ice had given way 
entirely. 

Blair pushed Nannie’s hand from his arm, and getting 
up, walked over to the marble-topped centre-table; 
he stood there slowly turning over the pages of The 
Poetesses of America, in rigid determination to hold his 
tongue. Mrs. Maitland’s eyebrow began to rise; her 
fingers tightened on her hurrying needles until the nails 
were white. Nannie, looking from one to the other, 
trembled with apprehension. Then she made an excuse 
to take Blair to the other end of the room. 

173 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Come and look at my drawing,” she said; and added 
ander her breath: “Don’t tell her!” 

Blair shook his head. “I’ve got to, somehow.” But 
when he came back and stood in front of his mother, his 
hands in his pockets, his shoulder lounging against the 
mantelpiece, he was apparently his careless self agam. 
“Well,” he said, gaily, “if I haven’t anything of my 
own, it’s your fault; you’ve been too generous to me!” 

The knitting-needles flagged; Nannie drew a long 
breath. 

“Yes, you are too good to me,” he said; “and 3^ou 
work so hard! Why do you work like a—a man?” 
There was an uncontrollable quiver of disgust in his 
voice- 

His mother smiled, with a quick bridling of her head—• 
he was complimenting her 1 The soreness from his thrust 
about legality vanished. “Yes; I do work hard. I 
reckon there’s no man in the iron business who can get 
more pork for his shilling than I can! ” 

Blair cast an agonized look at Nannie; then set him¬ 
self to his task again—in rather a roundabout way: 
“Why don’t you spend some of your money on ^^ourself, 
Mother, instead of on me ?” 

“There’s nothing I want.” 

“But there are so many things you could have!” 

“I have everything I need,” said Mrs. Maitland; “a 
roof, a bed, a chair, and food to eat. As for all this 
truck that people spend their money on, what use is it ? 
that's what I want to know! What’s it worth?” 

Blair put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small 
beautifully carved jade box; he took off the lid deli¬ 
cately, and shook a scarab into the palm of his hand. 
“I’ll tell you what that is worth/’ he said, holding the 
dull-blue oval between his thumb and finger; then he 
mentioned a sum that made Nannie exclaim. His 
mother put down her knitting, and taking the bit ot 
eternity in her fingers, looked at it silently. “Do 3'ou 

l?4 


THE IRON WOMAN 


wonder I got that box, which is a treasure in itself, to 
hold such a treasure?” Blair exulted. 

Mrs. Maitland, handing the scarab back, began to 
knit furiously. “That’s what it’s worth,” he said; he 
was holding the scarab in his palm with a sort of tender¬ 
ness; his eyes caressed it. “But it isn’t what I paid. 
The collector was hard up, and I made him knock off 
twenty-five per cent, of the price.” 

“Hah!” said Mrs. Maitland; “well; I suppose ‘all’s 
fair in love and collections’?” 

“What’s unfair in that?” Blair said, sharply; “I buy 
in the cheapest market. You do that yourself, my dear 
mother.” When Blair said “my dear mother,” he was 
farthest from filial affection. “Besides,” he said, with 
strained self-control, “besides. I’m like you. I’m not 
‘ damn-fool honest ’!” 

“Oh, I didn’t say you weren’t honest. Only, if I 
was going to take advantage of anybody. I’d do it for 
something more important than a blue china beetle.” 

“The trouble with you. Mother, is that you don’t see 
anything but those hideous Works of yours!” her son 
burst out. 

“If I did, you couldn’t pay for your china beetles. 
Beetles? You couldn’t pay for the breeches you’re 
sitting in!” 

“Oh, Mamma! oh, Blair!” sighed poor Nannie. 

There was a violent silence. Suddenly Mrs. Maitland 
brought the flat of her hand furiously down on the table; 
then, without a word, got on her feet, pulled at the ball 
of pink worsted which had run behind a chair and caught 
under the caster; her jerk broke the thread. The next 
moment the parlor door banged behind her. 

Nannie burst out crying. Blair opened and closed his 
lips, speechless with rage. 

“What—^what made her so angry?” Nannie said, 
catching her breath. “ Was it the beetle ? ’ ’ 

“Don’t call it that ridiculous name! I’ll have to 
175 


THE IRON WOMAN 


borrow the $5,000. And where the devil I’ll get it I 
don’t know. Nannie, ‘goose Molly’ wasn’t an entire 
fool, after all!” 

“Blair!” his sister protested, horrified. But Blair 
was too angry to be ashamed of himself. He. could not 
see that his mother’s anger was only the other side of her 
love. In Sarah Maitland, not only maternity, but pride, 
the peculiar pride engendered in her by her immense 
business—pride and maternity together, demanded such 
high things of her son! Not finding them, the pain of 
disappointment broke into violent expression. Indeed, 
had this charming fellow, handsome, selfish, sweet- 
hearted, been some other woman’s son, she would have 
been far more patient with him. Her very love made 
her abominable to him. She was furiously angry when 
she left him there in Nannie’s parlor; all the same he 
did not have to borrow the $5,000. 

The next morning Sarah Maitland sent for her super¬ 
intendent. “Mr. Ferguson,” she said—they were in her 
private office, and the door was shut; “Mr. Ferguson, 
I think—^but I don’t know—I think Blair has been mak¬ 
ing an idiot of himself again. I saw in the paper that 
somebody called Maitland had been throwing money 
away on a picture. I don’t know what it was, and I 
don’t want to know. It was 14x18 inches; not feet. 
That was enough for me. Why, Ferguson, those big 
pictures in my parlor (I bought them when I was going 
to be married; a woman is sort of foolish then; I wouldn’t 
do such a thing now), those four pictures are 4x6 feet 
each; and they cost me $400; $100 apiece. But this 
New York man has paid $5,000 for one picture 14x18 
inches! If it was Blair—and it came over me last night, 
all of a sudden, that it was; he hasn’t got any $5,000 to 
pay for it. I don’t want to go into the matter with him; 
we don’t get along on such subjects. But I want 
you to ask him about it; maybe he’ll speak out to you, 
man fashion. If this ‘ Maitland ’ is just a fool of our name 

176 


THE IRON WOMAN 


so much the better; but if it is Blair, I’ve got to help 
him out, I suppose. I want you to settle the thing for 
rue. I—can’t.” Her voice broke on the last word; she 
coughed and cleared her throat before she could speak 
distinctly. “ I haven’t the time,” she said. 

Robert Ferguson listened, frowning. “You’ll give 
him money to spend in ways you don’t approve of?” 

She nodded sullenly. “ I have to.” 

“ You don’t have to!” he broke out; “for God’s sake, 
Mrs. Maitland, stop!'* 

“ What do you mean, sir ?” 

“ I mean . . . this isn’t my business, but I can’t see 
you—Mrs. Maitland, if I get to talking on this subject, 
we’ll quarrel.” 

The glare of anger in her face died out. She leaned 
back in her chair and looked at him. “I won’t quarrel 
with you. Go on. Say what you think. I won’t say 
I’ll take your advice, but I’ll listen to it.” 

“It’s what I have always told you. You are squeez¬ 
ing the life out of Blair by giving him money. You’ve 
always done it, because it was the easy thing to do. Let 
up on him! Give him a chance. Let him earn his 
money, or go without. Talk about making him inde¬ 
pendent—you’ve made him as dependent as a baby! 
I don’t know my Bible as well as you do, but there is a 
verse somewhere—something about ‘ fullness of bread and 
abundance of idleness.’ That’s what’s the trouble with 
Blair. ‘Fullness of bread and abundance of idleness.’” 

“But he’s been at college; he couldn’t work while he 
was at college,” she said, with honest bewilderment. 

“Of course he couldn’t. But why did you let him 
dawdle round at college, pretending to special, for a year 
after he graduated ? Of course he won't work so long as 
he doesn’t have to. The boy wouldn’t be human if he 
did! You never made him feel he had to get through 
and to go to work. You’ve given him everything he 
wanted, and you’ve exacted nothing in return; not 

177 


THE IRON WOMAN 


scholarship, nor even decent behavior. He’s gambled, 
and gone after women, and bought everything on earth 
he wanted—the only thing he knows how to do is to spend 
money! He has never done a hand’s turn of work in his 
life. He is just as much a dead beat as any beggar who 
gets his living out of other people’s pockets. That he 
gets it out of your pocket doesn’t alter that; that he 
doesn’t wear rags and knock at back doors doesn’t alter 
it. He’s a dead beat! Any man is, who takes and 
doesn’t give anything in return. It’s queer you can’t 
see that, Mrs. Maitland.” 

She was silent. 

“Why, look here: I’ve heard you say, many a time, 
that the best part of your life was when you had to work 
hardest. Isn’t that so?” She nodded. “Then why in 
thunder won’t you let Blair work? Let him work, or go 
without!” 

Again she did not speak. 

“For Heaven’s sake, give him a chance, before it’s 
too late!” 

Mrs. Maitland got up, and stood with her back to him, 
looking out of the smoke-grimed window. Presently 
she turned round. “Well, what would you do now— 
supposing he did buy the picture ?” 

“Tell him that he has overdrawn his allowance, and 
that if he wants the picture he must earn the money to 
pay for it. Say you’ll advance it, if instead of going to 
Europe this summer he’ll stay at home and go to work. 
Of course he can’t earn five thousand dollars. I doubt 
if he can earn five thousand cents! But make up a job 
—^just for this once; and help him out. I don’t believe 
in made-up jobs, on principle; but they’re better than 
nothing. If he won’t work, darn the picture! It can 
be resold.” 

She blew her lips out in a bubbling sigh, and began 
to bite her forefinger. Robert Ferguson had said his 
say. He gathered his papers together and got on his feet. 

178 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Mr. Ferguson . . He waited, his hand on the 
knob. 

“Yes?’' 

“ ’Bliged to you. But for the present—” 

“Very well,” Robert Ferguson said shortly, 

“Just put through the business of the picture. Here¬ 
after—” 

Ferguson shrugged his shoulders. 


CHAPTER XV 


After his first spasm of angry disgust, when he de¬ 
clared he would go East the next morning, Blair’s fancy 
for “hanging round Mercer” hardened into purpose; 
but he did not “hang round” his mother’s house. “The 
hotel is pretty bad,” he told Nannie, “but it’s better 
than this” So he took the most expensive suite in the 
big, dark old River House that in those days was Mer¬ 
cer’s best hotel. Its blackened fapade and the Doric 
colurnns of its entrance gave it a certain exterior dignity; 
and its interior comfort, combined with the reviving 
associations of youth, lengthened Blair’s two or three 
days to a week, then to a fortnight. 

The day after that distressing interview with his 
mother, he went gaily round to Mrs. Richie’s to pound 
David on the back, and say “Congratulations, old fellow! 
Why in thunder,” he complained, “didn’t I come back 
before? You’ve cut me out, you villain!” 

David grinned. 

“ ‘ Before the devil could come back, 

The angel had the inside track,’ ” 


he admitted. 

“Well, if you’ll take my advice, you won’t be too 
angelic,” Blair said a little dryly. “She always had a 
touch of the other thing in her, you know.” 

“You think I’d better cultivate a few vices?” David 
inquired amiably; “I’m obliged for an example, any¬ 
how!” 

But Blair did not keep up the chaffing. The at« 
i8o 


THE IRON WOMAN 


mosphere of Mrs. Richie’s house dominated him as com* 
pletely as when he was a boy. He looked at her serene 
face, her simple, feminine parlor, the books and flowers 
and pictures, — and thought of his mother and his 
mother’s house. Then, somehow, he was ashamed of his 
thoughts, because this dear lady said in her gentle 
way: 

“How happy your mother must be to have you at 
home again, Blair. You won’t rash right off and leave 
us, will you?” 

“Well,” he hesitated, “of course I don’t want to”— 
he was surprised at the ring of truth in his voice; “but 
I am going to paint this summer. I am going to be in 
one of the studios in Paris.” 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said simply. And Blair had an 
instant of uncertainty, although a moment before his 
“painting” had seemed to him necessary, because it 
facilitated another summer away from home; and after 
the interview with his mother’s general manager, a sum¬ 
mer away from home was more than ever desirable. 

Mr. Ferguson had handed over the five thousand 
dollars, and then freed his mind, Blair listened. He 
heard that he was a sucker, that he was a poor stick, that 
he wasn’t fit to black his mother’s boots. “They need 
it,” he said, chuckling; and Robert Ferguson nearly 
burst with anger! 

Yet when the check was on its way to New York, and 
the picture had been shipped to Mercer, Blair still lin¬ 
gered at the River House. The idea of “renewing their 
youth” had appealed to all four friends. In the next 
two or three weeks they were constantly together at 
either one house or the other, or at some outside rendez¬ 
vous arranged by Blair—a drive down to Willis’s, a 
theater party and supper, a moonlight v/alk. Once 
David suggested “ice-cream at Mrs. Todd’s.” But this 
fell through; Blair said that even his sentimentality 
could not face the blue paper roses, and when David 

i8i 


THE IRON WOMAN 


urged that the blue paper roses were part of the fun, 
Blair said, “Well, I’ll match you for it. All important 
decisions ought to be left to chance, to avoid the burden 
of responsibility!” A pitched penny favored Blair, and 
Mrs. Todd did not see the ‘ handsome couples.’ It was at 
the end of the first week, when they were all dining 
with Mrs. Richie—^the evening meal was beginning to be 
called dinner nowadays in Mercer; that Mrs. Richie’s soft 
eyes, which took duty and energy and ability so sweetly 
and trustingly for granted,—Mrs. Richie’s believing 
eyes did for Blair what Robert Ferguson’s vociferating 
truthfulness had not been able to accomplish. It was 
after dinner, and she and Blair had gone into the little 
plant-room, where the air was sweet with hyacinths and 
the moist greenness of ferns. 

“Blair,” she said, putting her soft hand on his arm; 
“ I want to say something. You won’t mind ?” 

“Mind anything you say ? I should think not I” 

“It is only that I want you to know that, when the 
time comes, I shall think it very fine in you, with your 
tastes and temperament, to buckle down at the Works. 
I shall admire you very much then, Blair.” 

He gave her a droll look. “Alas, dear Mrs. Richie,” 
he began; but she interrupted him. 

“Your mother will be so proud and happy when you 
get to work; and I wanted you to know that I, too—” 

He took her hand from his arm and lifted it to his lips; 
there was a courtliness about Blair, and a certain gravity, 
which at moments gave him positive distinction. “If 
there is any good in me,” he said, “you would bring it 
out.” Then he smiled. “But probably there isn’t 
any.” 

“Nonsense!” she cried, and hesitated; he saw that 
her leaf-brown eyes were wet. “You must make your 
life worth while, Blair. You must! It would be such 
a dreadful failure if you didn’t do anything but enjoy 
yourself.” 


182 


THE IRON WOMAN 


He was keenly touched. He did not kiss her hand 
again; he just put his arm around her, as David might 
have done, and gave her a hug. “Mrs. Richie! I— 
will brace up!” 

“You are a dear fellow,” she said, and kissed himc 
Then they went back to the other three, to find Eliza¬ 
beth in a gale of teasing merriment because, she said,. 
David was so “terribly talkative”! 

“He has sat there like a bump on a log for fifteen 
minutes,” she complained. “5ay something, dummy!” 
she commanded. 

David only chuckled, and pulled Blair into a comer 
to talk. “ You girls keep on your own side; don’t inter¬ 
rupt serious conversation,” he said. “Blair, I want to 
ask you—” And in a minute the two young men were 
deep in their own affairs. It was amusing to see how 
quickly all four of them fell back into the comfortable 
commonplace of old friendship, the men roaring over 
some college reminiscences, and the two girls grumbling 
at being left out. “Really,” said Mrs. Richie, “I should 
think none of you were more than fifteen!” 

That night, when he took his sister home, Blair was 
very silent. Her little trickle of talk about David and 
Elizabeth was apparently unheard. As they turned 
into their own street, the full moon, just rising out of the 
river mists, suddenly flooded the waste-lands beyond the 
Works; the gaunt outlines of the Foundry were touched 
with ethereal silver, and the Maitland house, looming up 
in a great black mass, made a gulf of shadow that drowned 
the dooryard and spread half-way across the squalid 
street. Beyond the shadow. ShantytoTO, in the quiet 
splendor of the moon, seemed as intangible as a dream. 

“Beautiful!” Blair said, involuntarily. He stood 
for a silent moment, drinking the beauty like win-e. 
perhaps it was the exhilaration of it that made him say 
abruptly: “Perhaps I’ll not go abroad. Perhaps I’ll 
pitch in.” 

183 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Nannie fairly jumped with astonishment. “Blairl 
^ou mean to go into the Works? This summer? Oh, 
how pleased Mamma would be! It would be perfectly 
splendid. OhT Nannie gave his arm a speechless 
squeeze. 

“ If I do, it will be because Mrs. Richie bolstered me up. 
Of course I would hate it like the devil; but perhaps it’s 
the decent thing to do? Oh, well; don’t say anything 
about it, I haven’t made up my mind—this is an awful 
place!” he said, with a shiver, looking across at Shanty¬ 
town and remembering what was hidden under the 
glamor of the moon. “The smell of it! Democracy is 
well enough, Nancy—until you smell it.” 

“But you could live at the hotel,” Nannie reminded 
him, as he pulled out his latch-key. 

“ You bet I would,” her brother said, laughing. '‘My 
dear, not even your society could reconcile me to the 
slums. But I don’t know whether I can screw myself 
up to the Works, anyhow. David won’t be in town, and 
that would be a nuisance. Well, I’ll think it over; 
but if I do stay, I tell you what it is!—you two girls will 
have to make things mighty agreeable, or I’ll clear out.” 

He did think it over; but Blair had never been 
taught the one regal word of life, he had never learned 
to say “ I ought,'* Therefore it needed more talks with 
Mrs. Richie, more days with Elizabeth—David, confound 
him! wouldn’t come, because he had to pack, but Nannie 
tagged on behind; it needed the “bolstering up” of 
much approval on the part of the onlookers, and much 
self-approval, too, before the screwing-up process reached 
a point where he went into his mother’s office in the 
Works and told her that if she was ready to take him 
on, he was ready to go to work. 

Mrs. Maitland was absolutely dumb with happiness. 
He wanted to go to work! He asked to be taken on! 
‘What do you say noiv^ friend Ferguson?” she jeered; 
“you thought he was going to play at his painting for 
184 


THE IRON WOMAN 


another year, and you wanted me to put his nose to the 
grindstone, and make him earn the money to pay for that 
fool picture. Isn’t it better to have him come to it of his 
own accord? I’d pay for ten pictures, if they made 
him want to go to work. As for his painting, it will 
be his father over again. My husband had his fancies 
about it, too, but he gave it all up when he married me; 
marriage always gives a man common sense,—marriage 
and business. That’s how it’s going to be with Blair,” 
she ended complacently. “Blair has brains; I’ve 
always said so.” 

Robert Ferguson did not deny the brains, but he was 
as astonished as she. 

“I believe,” he challenged Mrs. Richie, put him 
up to it ? You always could wind that boy round your 
finger.” 

“I did talk to him,” she confessed; it was their last 
interview, for she and David were starting East that 
night, and Mr. Ferguson had come in to say good-by. 
“ I talked to him—a little. Mrs. Maitland’s disappoint* 
ment about him went to my heart. Besides, I am very 
fond of Blair; there is a great deal of good in him. You 
are prejudiced.” 

“No I’m not. I admit that as his mother says, 
‘ he’s no fool ’; but that only makes his dilly-dallying so 
much the worse. Still, I believe that if she were to lose 
all her money, and he were to fall very much in love and 
be refused, he might amount to something. But it 
would need both things to make a man of him.” 

Robert Ferguson sighed, and Mrs. Richie left the 
subject of the curative expect of unsuccessful love, with 
nervous haste. “I am go ng to charge Elizabeth and 
Nannie to do all they can to make it pleasant for him, 
so that he won’t find the Works too terrible,” she said. 
At which reflection upon the Works, Mr, Ferguson 
barked so fiercely that she felt quite at ease with him. 
But his barking did not prevent her from telling the girls 
i8S 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that business would be very hard for Blair, and they 
must cheer him up: “Do try to amuse him! You know 
it is going to be very stupid for him in Mercer.” 

Nannie, of course, needed no urging; as for Elizabeth, 
she was a little contemptuous. Oh yes; she would do 
what she could, she said„ “Of course, I’m awfully fond 
of Blair, but—” 

The fact was, she was contrasting in her own mind 
the man who had to be “amused” to keep him at his 
work, with David—“working himself to death!” she told 
Nannie, proudly. And Nannie, quick to feel the slur in 
her words, said: 

“ Yes, but it is quite different with Blair. Blair 
doesn’t have to do anything, you know.” 

Still, thanks to Mrs. Richie, he was at least going to 
pretend to do something. And so, at a ridiculously 
high salary, he entered, as he told Elizabeth humorously, 
“upon his career.” The only thing he did to make life 
more tolerable for himself was to live in the hotel instead 
of in his mother’s house. But it was characteristic of 
him that he left the wonderful old canvas—^the “four¬ 
teen by eighteen inch” picture, hanging on the wall in 
Nannie’s parlor. “You ought to have something fit for a 
civilized eye to rest upon,” he told her, “and I can see it 
when I come to see you.” If his permanent departure 
for the River House wounded his mother, she made no pro¬ 
test ; she only lifted a pleased eyebrow when he dropped 
in to supper, which, she noticed, he was apt to do when¬ 
ever Elizabeth happened to take tea with Nannie. 
When he did come, Sarah Maitland used to look about 
the dining-room table, with its thick earthenware dishes— 
the last of the old Canton serv’ce had found its way to the 
ash-bav -el; she used to glance at the three young people 
with warm satisfaction. “Like old times!” she would 
say kindly; “only needs David to make it complete.” 

Mrs. Maitland was sixty-two that spring, but there 
was no stoop of the big shoulders, no sign of that settling 

i86 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and shrinking that age brings. She was at the full tide 
of her vigor, and her happiness in having her son beside 
her in the passion of her life, which was second only to 
her passion for him, showed itself in clumsy efforts to 
flaunt her contentment before her world. Every morning, 
with varying unpunctuality, Blair came into her office at 
the Works where she had had a desk placed for him. 
He was present, because she insisted that he should be, 
at the regular conferences which she held with the heads 
of departments. She made a pretense of asking his 
advice, which was as amusing to Mr. Ferguson and the 
under-superintendents as it was tiresome to Blair. For 
after his first exhilaration in responding to Mrs. Richie’s 
high belief in him, the mere doing of duty began grad¬ 
ually to pall. Her belief helped him through the first 
four or five months, then the whole thing became a bore. 
His work was ludicrously perfunctory, and his listless¬ 
ness when in the office was apparent to everybody. 
At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have 
known that it was all a farce, Blair was worth nothing 
to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly 
drawing of an uneari ed “salary.” Perhaps if Mrs. 
Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again 
the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble 
sense of duty which had started him upon his “career,” 
might have struck a root down through feeling, into the 
rock-bed of character. But as it was, not even the 
girls’ obedience to her order, “to amuse Blair,” made 
up for the withdrawal of her own sustaining inspiration. 

But at least Nannie and Elizabeth kept him fairly 
contented out of business hours; and so long as he was 
contented, things were smooth between him and his 
mother. There was, as Blair expressed it, “only one 
rumpus” that whole summer, and it was a very mild 
one, caused by the fact that he did not go to church. 
On those hot July Sunday mornings, his mother in black 
silk, and Nannie in thin lawn, sat in the family pew 

187 


THE IRON WOMAN 


fanning themselves, and waiting; Nannie, constantly 
turning to look down the aisle; Sarah Maitland intent for 
a familiar step and a hand upon the little baize-lined 
door of the pew. The “rumpus” came when, on the 
third Sunday, Blair was called to account. 

It was after supper, in the hot dusk in Nannie’s parlor; 
Elizabeth was there, and the two girls, in white dresses, 
were fanning themselves languidly; Blair, at the piano, 
was playing the Largo, with much feeling. The ViT-in- 
dows were open. It was too warm for lamps, and the 
room was lighted only by the occasional roar of flames, 
breaking fan-like from the tops of the stacks in the Yards. 
Suddenly, in the midst of their idle talk, Mrs, Maitland 
came in; she paused for a moment before the dark 
oblong of canvas on the wall beside the door. Of course, 
in the half-light, the little dim Mother of God—immortal 
maternity!—could scarcely be seen. 

“Umph,” she said, “a dirty piece of canvas, at about 
twenty dollars a square inch!” No one spoke. “Let’s 
see;” she calculated;—“ore is $io a ton; 20 tons to a 
car; say one locomotive hauls 25 cars. Well, there 
you have it: a trainload of iron ore, to pay for this!'* 
she snapped a thumb and finger against the canvas. 
Blair jumped—then ran his right hand up the keyboard 
in a furious arpeggio. But he said nothing. Mrs. 
Maitland, moving away from the picture, blew out her 
lips in a loud sigh. “Well,” she said; “tastes differ, as 
the old woman said when she kissed her cow.” 

Still no one spoke, but Elizabeth rose to offer her a 
chair, “No,” she said, coming over and resting an 
elbow on the mantelpiece, “I won’t sit down. I’m 
going in a minute.” 

As she stood there, unrest spread about her as rings 
from a falling stone spread on the surface of a pool. 
Blair yawned, and got up from the piano; Elizabeth 
fidgeted; Nannie began to talk nervously. 

“Blair,” said his mother, her strident voice over- 
188 


THE IRON WOMAN 

riding the girls’ chatter, “ why don’t you come to 
church?” 

His answer was perfectly unevasive and entirely good« 
natured. “Well, for one thing, I don’t believe the things 
the church teaches.” 

“What do you believe?” she demanded. And he 
answered carelessly, that really, he hardly knew. 

It was, of course, the old difference of the generations; 
but it was more marked because these two generations 
had never spoken the same language, therefore quiet, 
sympathetic disagreement was impossible. It was im¬ 
possible, too, because the actual fact was that neither 
her behef nor his disbelief were integral to their lives. 
Her creed was a barbarous anthropomorphism, which 
had created an offended and puerile god—a god of foreign 
missions and arid church-going and eternal damnation. 
The fear of her god (such as he was) would, no doubt, 
have protected her against certain physical temptations, 
to which, as it happened, her temperament never in¬ 
clined; but he had never safeguarded her from the 
temptation of cutthroat competition, or even of busi¬ 
ness shrewdness which her lawyer showed her how to 
make legal. Blair, on the contrary, had long ago dis¬ 
carded the naive brutalities of Presbyterianism; church¬ 
going bored him, and he was not interested in saving souls 
in Africa. But, like most of us—like his mother, in fact, 
he had a god of his own, a god who might have safe¬ 
guarded him against certain intellectual temptations; 
cheating at cards, or telling the truth, if the truth would 
compromise a woman. But as he had no desire to cheat 
at cards, and the women whom he might have compro¬ 
mised did not need to be lied about, his god was of as 
little practical value to him as his mother’s was to her. 
So they were neither of them speaking of realities when 
Mrs. Maitland said: “What do you believe? What 
have you got instead of God?” 

“Honor,” Blair said promptly. 

189 


THE IRON WOMAN 


What do you mean by honor?” she said, impatiently. 

“Well,” her son reflected, “there are things a man 
simply can’t do; that’s all. And that’s honor, don’t 
you know. Of course, religion is vSupposed to keep 
you from doing things, too. But there’s this differ¬ 
ence : religion, if you pick pockets—I speak metaphor¬ 
ically; threatens you with hell. Honor threatens you 
with yourself.” As he spoke he frowned, as if a disa¬ 
greeable idea had occurred to him. 

His mother frowned, too. That hell and a man’s 
self might be the same thing had never struck Sarah 
Maitland. She did not understand what he meant, 
and feeling herself at a disadvantage, retaliated with the 
reproof she might have administered to a boy of fifteen: 
“ You don’t know what you are talking about!” 

The man of twenty-five laughed lazily. “Your re¬ 
ligion is very amusing, my dear mother.” 

Her face darkened. She took her elbow from the 
mantelpiece, and seemed uncertain what to do. Blair 
sprang to open the door, but she made an irritated ges¬ 
ture, “I know how to open doors,” she said. She 
threw a brief “good-night” to Elizabeth, and turned a 
cheek to Nannie for the kiss that had fallen there, soft as 
a little feather, in all the nights of all the years they had 
lived together. “’Night, Blair,” she said shortly; then 
hesitated, her hand on the door-knob. There was an 
instant when the command “(To to churchT' trembled 
upon her lips, but it was not spoken. “I advise you,” 
she said roughly, “to get over your conceit, and try to 
get some religion into you. Your father and your grand¬ 
father didn’t think they could get along without it; they 
went to church! But you evidently think you are 
so much better than they were that you can stay 
away.” 

The door slammed behind her. Blair whistled. 
“Poor dear mother!” he sighed; and turned round to 
listen to the two girls. “ Can you be ready to start on 
190 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the first?” Elizabeth was asking Nannie, evidently trying 
to cover up the awkwardness of that angry exit. 

“ Start where ?” Blair asked. 

“Why, East! You know. I told you ages ago,” 
Nannie explained. “Elizabeth and I are going to stay 
with Mrs. Richie at the seashore.” 

“You never said a word about it,” Blair said dis« 
gustedly. His annoyance knew no disguise. “ I call it 
pretty shabby for you two to go off! What's going to 
happen to me?” 

“Business, Blair, business!” Elizabeth mocked. But 
Nannie was plainly conscience-stricken. “I’ll not go^ 
if you’d rather I didn’t, Blair.” 

“Nonsense!” her brother said shortly, “of course you 
must go, but—” He did not finish his thought, what¬ 
ever it was; he went back to the piano and began to 
drum idly. His face was sharply annoyed. That defini¬ 
tion of his god which he had made to his mother, had 
aroused a nameless uneasiness. It occurred to him that 
perhaps he was “picking a pocket,” in finding such em¬ 
phatic satisfaction in Elizabeth’s society. Now, abrupt¬ 
ly, at the news of her approaching absence, the uneasi¬ 
ness sharpened into faintly recognizable outlines. 

He struck a jarring chord on the piano, and told him¬ 
self not to be a fool. “She’s mighty good fun. Of 
course I shall miss her or any other girl, in this God¬ 
forsaken hole! That’s all it amounts to. Anyhow, she’s 
dead in love with David.” Sitting there in the hot dusk, 
listening, to the voices of the girls, Blair felt suddenly 
irritated with David. “Darn him, why does he go off 
and leave her in this way? Not but what it is all right 
so far as I am concerned; onl}^—” Then, wordlessly, his 
god must have accused him, for he winced. “I am not, 
not in the least!” he said. The denial confessed him to 
himself, and there was an angry bang of discordant 
octaves. The two girls called out in dismay. 

“Oh, do stop!” Elizabeth said. Blair got up from the 
13 191 


THE IRON WOMAN 


piano-stool and came over to them silently. His thoughts 
were in clamoring confusion. “I am wo/,” he said again 
to himself. “I like her, but that’s all.” There was a 
look of actual panic on his lazily charming face. He 
glanced at Elizabeth, who, her head on Nannie’s shoul-. 
der, v/as humming softly: “ ‘Oh, won’t it be joyful—^joy¬ 
ful—joyful—’ ” and clenched his hands. 

He was very silent as he walked home with her that 
night. When they reached her door, Elizabeth looked 
up at the closed shutters of Mrs. Richie’s house, and 
sighed. “How dreary a closed house looks!” she said. 
“I almost wish Uncle would rent it, but he won’t. I 
think he is keeping it for Mrs. Richie to live in when 
David and I settle down in Philadelphia.” 

Blair was apparently not interested in Mrs. Richie’s 
future. “I wish,” he said, “that I’d gone to Europe 
this summer.” 

“Well, that’s polite, considering that Nannie and I 
have spent our time making it agreeable for you.” 

“ I stayed in Mercer because I thought I’d like a sum¬ 
mer with Nannie,” he defended himself; he was just 
turning away at the foot of the steps, but he stopped and 
called back: “with Nannie —and you'* 

Elizabeth, from the open door, looked after him with 
frank astonishment. “How long since Nannie and I 
have been so much appreciated?” 

“I think I began to appreciate you a good while ago, 
Elizabeth,” he said, significantly; but she did not hear 
him. “Perhaps it’s just as well she’s going,” he told 
himself, as he went slowly back to the hotel. “Not that 
I’m smitten; but I might be. I can see that I might be, 
if I should let myself go.” But he was confident that 
allegiance to his god would keep him from ever letting 
himself go. 

The girls went East that week, and when they did, 
Blair took no more meals in the ofiice-dining-room. 


CHAPTER XVI 


It v/as a very happy time that the inland girls spent 
with Mrs. Richie, in her small house on the Jersey shore. 
It happened that neither of them had ever seen the 
ocean, and their first glimpse of it was a great experi¬ 
ence. Added to that was the experience, new to both of 
them, of daily companionship with a serene nature. 
Mrs. Richie was always a little remote, a little inclined 
to keep people at arm’s-length; there were undercur¬ 
rents of sadness in her talk, and she was perhaps rather 
absorbed in her own supreme affair, maternal love. 
Also, her calm outlook upon heavenly horizons made the 
affairs of the girls seem sometimes disconcertingly small, 
and to realize the smallness of one’s affairs is in itself 
an experience to youth. But in spite of the ultimate 
reserves they felt in her, Mrs. Richie was sympathetic, 
and full of soft gaieties, with endless patience for people 
and events. Elizabeth’s old uneasy dislike of her had 
long since yielded to the fact that she was David’s 
mother, and so must be, and in theory was, loved. But 
the love was really only a faint awe at what she still 
called “perfection”; and during the two months of 
living under the same roof with her, Elizabeth felt at 
times a resentful consciousness that Mrs. Richie was 
afraid of that ungovernable temper, which, the girl used 
to say, impatiently, “never hurts anybody but my¬ 
self!” Like most high-tempered people, Elizabeth, 
though penitent and more or less mortified by her out¬ 
bursts of fury, was always a little astonished when any 
one took them seriously; and Mrs. Richie took them 
very seriously. 


193 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Nannie, being far simpler than Elizabeth, was less 
impressed by Mrs. Richie than by her surroundings 
the ocean, the whole gamut of marine sights and hap¬ 
penings; Mrs. Richie’s housekeeping; the delicate food 
and serving (what would Harris have thought of that 
table!)—all these things, as well as David’s fortnightly 
visits, and Elizabeth’s ardors and gay coldnesses, were 
delights to Nannie. Both girls had an absorbingly 
good time, and when the last day of the last week finally 
arrived, and Mr. Robert Ferguson appeared to escort 
them home, they were both of them distinctly doleful. 

“Every perfect thing stops!’’ Elizabeth sighed to 
David. They had left the porch, and gone down on to 
the sands flooded with moonlight and silence. The 
evening was very still and warm, and the full blue pour 
of the moon made everything softly unreal, except the 
glittering path of light crossing the breathing, black ex¬ 
panse of water. David had hesitated when she had 
suggested leaving the others and coming dowm here by 
themselves,—then he had looked at Nannie, sitting be¬ 
tween Robert Ferguson and his mother, and seemed to 
reassure himself; but he was careful to choose a place 
on the beach where he could keep an eye on the porch. 
He was talking to Elizabeth in his anxious way, about 
his work, and how soon his income would be large 
enough for them to marry. “The minus sign expresses 
it now,” he said; “I could kick myself when I think 
that, at twenty-six, my mother has to pay my wash¬ 
woman!” Their engagement had continued to accentu¬ 
ate the difference in the development of these two; 
David’s manhood was more and more of the mind; 
Elizabeth’s womanhood was most exquisitely of the 
body. When he spoke of his shame in being supported 
by his mother, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder, 
careless of the three spectators on the porch, and said 
softly, “David, I love you so that I would like to 
scrub floors for you.” He laughed; “I wouldn’t like 
104 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to have you scrub floors, thank you! Why in thunder 
don’t I get ahead faster,” he sighed. Then he told her 
that the older men in the profession were “so darned 
mean, even the big fellows, ’way up,” that they kept on 
practising when they could just as well sit back on their 
hind legs and do nothing, and give the younger men a 
chance. 

“They are nothing but money-grabbers,” Elizabeth 
agreed, burning with indignation at all successful physi¬ 
cians. “But David, we can live on very little. Com- 
beef is very cheap. Cherry-pie says. So’s liver.” 

Up on the porch the conversation was quite as prac¬ 
tical as it was down by the moonlit water: 

“Elizabeth .'s to have a little bit of money handed 
over to her on her next birthday,” Mr. Ferguson was 
saying; then he twitched the black ribbon of his glasses 
and brought them tumbling from his nose; “it’s an in¬ 
heritance from her father.” 

“Oh, how exciting!” said Nannie. “Will it make it 
possible for them to be married any sooner?” 

“They can’t marry on the interest on it,” he said, 
with his meager laugh; “it’s only a nest-egg.” 

Mrs. Richie sighed. “Well, of course they must be 
prudent, but I am sorry to have them wait. It will be 
some time before David’s practice is enough for them to 
marry on. He is so funny in planning their housekeep¬ 
ing expenses,” she said, with that mother-laugh of 
mockery and love. “You should hear the economies 
they propose!” And she told him some of them. “ They 
make endless calculations as to how little they can possi¬ 
bly live on. You would never suppose they could be so 
ignorant as to the cost of things! Of course I enlighten 
them when they deign to consult me. I do wish David 
would let me give him enough to get married on,” she 
ended, a little impatiently. 

“I think he’s right not to,” Robert Ferguson said. 

“David is so queer about money,” Nannie commented^ 

195 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and rose, saying she wanted to go indoors to the lamp¬ 
light and her book. 

“Pity Biair hasn't some of David's ‘queemess,’Mr. 
Ferguson barked, when she had vanished into the house. 

Mrs. Richie looked after her uneasily, missing her 
protecting presence. But in Mr. Ferguson's matter-of- 
fact talk he seemed just the same harsh, kind, unsenti¬ 
mental neighbor of the last seventeen years; “he's 
forgotten his foolishness,'' she thought, and resigned her¬ 
self, comfortably, to Nannie's absence. “Does Eliza¬ 
beth know about the legacy ?'' she asked. 

“No, she hasn't an idea of it. I was bound that the 
expectation of money shouldn't spoil her." 

“Well," she jeered at him, “ I do hope you are satisfied 
now, that she is not spoiled by money or anything else! 
How afraid you were to let yourself really love the child 
—poor little Elizabeth!" 

“I had reason," he insisted doggedly. “Life had 
played a trick on me once, and I made up my mind not 
to build on anybody again, until I was sure of them." 
Then, without looking at her, he said, as if following out 
some line of thought, “ I hope you have come to feel that 
you will marry me, Mrs. Richie?" 

“0/^/" she said, in dismay. 

“I don't see why you can't make up your mind to it,” 
he continued, frowning; “I know"—he stopped, and 
put on his glasses carefully with both hands—“I know 
I am a bear, but—" 

“ You are not!" 

“Don’t interrupt. I am. But not at heart. Listen 
to me, at my age, talking about 'hearts’!" They both 
laughed, and then Mr. Ferguson gave a snort of im¬ 
patience. “Look at those two youngsters down there, 
engaged to be married, and swearing by the moon that 
nobody ever loved as they do. How absurd it is! A 
man has to be fifty before he knows enough about love 
V) get married." 

io6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Nonsense!” 

“I cannot take youth seriously,” he ruminated: “its 
behavior, yes; that may be serious enough! Youth is 
always firing the Ephesian dome; but youth itself, and 
its opinions, always seem to me a Httle ridiculous. Yet 
those two infants seem to thirik that they have dis¬ 
covered love! Well,” he interrupted himself, in sudden 
somber memory, I felt that way once myself. And 
yet now, I know—” 

Mrs. Richie said hurriedly something about its being 
too damp for Elizabeth on the sand. “ Do call them in!” 

He laughed. “No; you don’t need ’em. I won’t say 
any more—^to-night.” 

“Here they come!” Mrs.Richie said in a relieved voice. 

A minute before, David, looking up at the porch, and 
discovering Nannie’s absence, had said, “Let’s go in.” 
“Oh, must we?” Elizabeth said, reluctantly. “I’d so 
much rather sit down here and have you kiss me.” But 
she came, perforce, for David, in his anxiety not to leave 
his mother alone with Mr. Ferguson, was already half¬ 
way up the beach. 

“Do tell Elizabeth about the money now,” Mrs. 
Richie saM. 

“I will,” said Robert Ferguson; but added, under 
his breath, “I sha’n’t give up, you know.” Mrs. Richie 
was careful not to hear him. 

“Elizabeth!” she said, eagerly. “Your uncle has 
some news for you.” And Mr. Ferguson told his niece 
briefly, that on her birthday in December she would 
come into possession of some money left her by her 
father. 

“Don’t get up your expectations, it’s not much,” 
he said, charily, “but it’s something to start on.” 

“Oh, Uncle! how splendid!” she said, and caught 
David’s hand in both of hers. “David!”—her face 
was radiantly unconscious of the presence of the others-' 
“perhaps we needn’t wait two years?” 

197 


THE IRON WOMAN 


*‘I’m afraid it won’t make much difference.” David 
spoke rather grimly; “I must be able to buy your shoe¬ 
strings myself, you know, before we can be married.” 

Elizabeth dropped his hand, and the dimple straigh¬ 
tened in her cheek. 

Mrs. Richie smiled at her. “Young people have to 
be prudent, dear child.” 

‘ How much money shall I have. Uncle?” Elizabeth 
asked coldly. 

He told her. “Not a fortune; but David needn’t 
worry about your shoestrings.” 

“Yes, I will,” he broke in, with a laugh. “She’ll 
have to go barefoot, if I can’t get ’em for her!” 

Elizabeth exclaimed, with angry impatience, and 
Robert Ferguson, chuckling, struck him lightly on the 
shoulder. “Look out you don’t fall over backward try¬ 
ing to stand up straight!” he said. 

The possibility of an earlier wedding-day was not 
referred to again. The next morning they all went up 
to town together in the train, and EHzabeth, who had 
recovered from her momentary displeasure, did no 
more than cast glowing looks at David—^lovely, melting 
looks of delicate passion, as virginal as an opening lily— 
looks that said, “I wish we did not have to wait!” For 
her part, she would have been glad “to go barefoot,” 
if only they might the sooner tread the path of life to ¬ 
gether. 

YThen they got into Mercer, late in the evening, who 
should meet them at the station but Blair. Robert 
Ferguson, with obvious relief, immediately handed his 
charges over to the young man with a hurried explana¬ 
tion that he must see some one on business before going 
to his own house. “Take the girls home, will you, 
Biair?” Blair said that that was what he was there 
for. Flis method of taking them home was to put Nan¬ 
nie into one carriage, and get into another with Eliza 
beth, who, a little surprised, asked where Nannie was. 

iqS 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ It would delay you to go round to our house nrst/'' 
Blair explained. “You forget we live in the slums. 
And Nannie’s in a hurry, so I sent her directly home. 
She doesn’t mind going by herself, you know. Look 
here, you tv/o girls have been away an abominably 
long time ! I’ve been terribly lonely—^without Nan¬ 
nie.” 

He had indeed been lonely “without Nannie.” In 
these empty, meaningless weeks at the Works, Blair 
Maitland had suddenly stumbled against the negations 
of life. Hitherto, he had known only the easy and 
delightful assents of Fate; this was his first experience 
with the inexorable No. A week after the girls went 
East, he admitted to himself that, had David been out 
of the way, he would undoubtedly have fallen in love 
with Elizabeth. “As it is, of course I haven’t,” he de¬ 
clared. Night after night in those next weeks, as he 
idled moodily about Mercer’s streets, or, lounging across 
the bridge, leaned on the handrail and watched the 
ashes from his cigar flicker down into the unseen current 
below, he said the same thing: “I am not in love with 
her, and I sha’n’t allow myself to be. I won’t let it go 
any farther. But David is no man for a girl like Eliza¬ 
beth to marry.” Then he would fall to thinking just 
what kind of man Elizabeth ought to marry. Such 
reflections proved, so he assured himself, how entirely 
he knew that she belonged to David. Sometimes he 
wondered sullenly whether he had not better leave Mer¬ 
cer before she came back ? Perhaps it was his god who 
made this suggestion; if so, he did not recognize a 
divine voice. He always decided against such a course. 
It would be cowardly, he told himself, to keep av/ay 
from Elizabeth. “I will see her when she gets home, 
just as usual. To stay away might make her think that 
I was—afraid. And I am not in the least, because I 
am not in love with her, and I shall not allow myself to 
be.” He was perfectly sure of himself, and perfectly 

199 


THE IRON WOMAN 


sincere, too; what lover has ever understood that love 
has nothing to do with volition! 

Now, alone with her in the old depot carriage, his 
sureness permitted him to say, significantly, 

“ I have been terribly lonely—without Nannie. 

“I thought you were absorbed in business cares,’* 
she told him drolly. “ How do you like business, Blair, 
really?” 

“Loathe it,” he said succinctly. “Elizabeth, come 
and take dinner with us to-morrow evening ? ” 

“Oh. Nannie’s had enough of me. She’s been with 
me for nearly two months.” 

“ I haven’t been with you for two months. Be a good 
girl, and do some missionary work. Slumming is the 
fashion, you know. Come and cheer me up. It’s been 
fiendishly stupid without you.” 

She laughed at his sincerely gloomy voice. 

“Come,” he urged; “well have dinner in the back 
parlor. Do you remember that awful dinner-party?” 
He laughed as he spoke, but—^being ‘ sure ’;—^in the dark¬ 
ness of the shabby hack he looked at her intently. . . . 
Oh, if David were only out of the way! 

“Remember it? I should think I did!” There was 
no telltale flicker on her smooth cheek; even in the 
gloom of the carriage he could see that the dark amber 
of her eyes brimmed over with amusement, and the 
dimple deepened entrancingly. “How could I forget 
it? Didn’t I wear my first long dress to that dinner¬ 
party—oh, and my six-button gloves?” 

“I—” said Blair, and paused. “/ remember other 
things than the gloves and long dress, Elizabeth.” 
(Why shouldn’t he say as much as that ? He was certain 
of himself, and David was certain of her, so why not speak 
of what it gave him a rapturous pang to remember ?) 

But at his words the color whipped into her cheek; 
her clear brows drew together into a slight frown. “ How 
is your mother, Blair?” she said coldly. 

200 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Oh, very well. Can you imagine Mother an3rthing 
but well? The heat has nearly killed me, but Mother 
is iron.'’ 

“She’s perfectly wonderful!” 

“Yes; wonderful woman,” he agreed carelessly. 
“Elizabeth, promise you’ll come to-morrow evening?” 

“Cherry-pie would think it was horrid in me not to 
stay with her, when I’ve been away so long.” 

“ I think it’s horrid in you not to stay with me.” 

She laughed; then sighed. “David is working 
awfully hard, Blair.” 

“Darn David!” he retorted, laughing. “So am I, if 
that’s any reason for your giving a man your society.” 

“You! You couldn’t work hard to save your life.” 

“I could, if I had somebody to work for, as David 
has.” 

“You’d better get somebody,” she said gaily. 

“I don’t want any second-bests,” he declared. 

“Donkey!” Elizabeth said good-naturedly. But. she 
was a little surprised, for whatever else Blair was, he 
was not stupid—and such talk is always stupid. That 
it had its root in anything deeper than chaffing never 
occurred to her. They were at her own door by this 
time, and Blair, helping her out of the carriage, looked 
into her face, and his veins ran hot. 

The next morning, when he went to see Nannie, he 
was absorbed and irritable. “Girls are queer,” he told 
her; “they marry all kinds of men. But I’ll tell you one 
thing: David is the last man for a girl like Elizabeth. 
He is perfectly incapable of understanding her.” 

That was the first day that he did not assure himself 
that he “was not in love.” 


CHAPTER XVII 


That autumn, with its heats and brown fogs and 
sharp frosts, was the happiest time in Sarah Maitland’s 
life—the happiest time, at least, since those brief months 
of marriage ;—Blair was in the Business! “If only his 
father could see him!” she used to say to herself. Of 
course, ohe had moments of disappointment; once or 
twice moments of anger, even; and once, at any rat^, 
she had a moment of fright. She had summoned her 
son peremptorily to go with her to watch a certain 
experiment. Blair appeared, shrinking, bored, absent- 
minded, nearly an hour later than the time she had set. 
That put her in a bad humor to start with; but as they 
W'ere crossing the Yards, her irritation suddenly deepened 
into dismay: Blair, his lip drooping with disgust at the 
sights and sounds about him, his hands in his pockets, 
was lounging along behind her, and she, realizing that 
he was not at her side, stopped and looked back. He 
was standing still, looking up, his eyes radiant, his lips 
parted with delight. 

“What is it?” she called. He did not hear her; he 
stood there, gazing at three white butterflies that were 
zigzagging into a patch of pale blue sky. How they 
had come into this black and clamorous spot, why they 
had left their fields of goldenrod and asters farther down 
the river, who can say ? But here they were, darting up 
and up, crossing, dipping, dancing in the smoky sun¬ 
shine that flooded thinly the noisy squalor of the Yards. 
Blair, looking at them, said, under his breath, in pure 
delight, “Yes, just like the high notes. A flight of 
violin notes!” 


202 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Blair!” came the impatient voice; “what's the 
matter vath you?” 

“Nothing, nothing.” 

“ I was just going to tell you that a high silicon pig—” 

“My dear mother,” he interrupted wearily, “there is 
something else in the world than pig. I saw three butter¬ 
flies—” 

“Butterflies!” 

She stood in the cinder pathway in absolute conster¬ 
nation. Was her son a fool ? For a moment she was so 
startled that she was not even angry. “Come on,” she 
said soberly; and they went into the Works in silence. 

That evening, when he dropped into supper, she 
watched him closely, and by and by her face lightened a 
little. Of course, to stop and gape up into the air was 
silly; but certainly he was talking intelligently enough 
now,—though it was only to Elizabeth Ferguson, who 
happened to be taking supper with them. Yes, he did 
not look like a fool. “He has brains,” she said to her¬ 
self, frowning, “but why doesn’t he use ’em?” She 
sighed, and called out loudly, “Harris! Corn-beef!’* 
But as she hacked off a slab of boiled meat, she won¬ 
dered why on earth Nannie asked Elizabeth to tea so 
often, and especially why she asked her on those evenings 
when Blair happened to be at home. “Elizabeth is such 
a little blatherskite,” she reflected, good-naturedly, 
“the boy doesn’t get a chance to talk to me!” Then it 
occurred to her that perhaps he came because Elizabetli 
came ? for it v/as evident that she amused him. Well!, 
Sarah Maitland had no objection. To secure her son for 
her dingy supper table she was willing to put up with 
Elizabeth or any other girl. But certainly Nannie in¬ 
vited her very often. “I’ll come in to-night, if you’ll 
invite Elizabeth,” Blair would bribe her. And Nannie, 
like Mrs. Maitland herself, would have invited anybody 
to gain an hour of her brother’s company. 

Those four weeks had committed Blair Maitland to his 
203 


THE IRON WOMAN 


first real passion. He was violently in love, and now he 
acknowledged it. The moment had come when his 
denials became absurd, even to himself, so he no longer 
said he did not love her; he merely said he would never 
let her know he loved her. “ If she doesn’t know it, I am 
square with David,” he argued. Curiously enough, 
when he said “David,” he always thought of David’s 
mother. He was profoundly unhappy, and yet ex¬ 
hilarated—^there is always exhilaration in the aching 
melancholy of hopeless love; but somewhere, back in 
his mind, there was probably the habit of hope. He 
had always had everything he wanted, so why should 
not fate be kind now.'^—of course without any question¬ 
able step on his part. “I will never tell her,” he as¬ 
sured himself; the words stabbed him, but he meant 
them. He only wished, irrationally enough, that Mrs. 
Richie might know how agonizingly honorable he 
was. 

Elizabeth herself did not know it; she had not the 
slightest idea that he was in love with her. There were 
probably two reasons for an unconsciousness which 
was certainly rather unusual, for a woman almost always 
knows. Some tentacles of the soul seem brushed by the 
brutalities of the material fact, and she knows and re¬ 
treats—or advances. Elizabeth did not know, and so 
did not retreat. Perhaps one reason for her naive stupid¬ 
ity was the commonplaceness of her relations with Blair. 
She had known him all her life, and except for that one 
childish playing at love, which, if she ever remembered 
it, seemed to her entirely funny, she had never thought 
of him in any other way than as “Nannie’s brother”; 
and Nannie was, for all practical purposes, her sister. 
Another reason was her entire absorption in her own 
love-affair. Ever since she had learned of the little 
legacy, the ardent thought had lurked in her mind that 
it might, somehow, in spite of David’s absurd theories 
about shoestrings, hasten her marriage. 

204 


THE IRON WOMAN 


With all this money, why on earth should we wait ?’* 
she fretted to Nannie. 

“My dear! you couldn’t live on the interest of it!” 

“I don’t know why not,” Elizabeth said, wilfully, 

“Goose!” Nannie said, much amused, “No; the 
only thing you could do would be to live on your princi¬ 
pal. Why don’t you do that?” 

Elizabeth looked suddenly thoughtful. When she 
went home she repeated Nannie’s careless words to Miss 
White, who nibbled doubtfully, and said she never heard 
of such a thing. But after that, for days, they talked of 
household economies, and with Cherry-pie’s help Eliza¬ 
beth managed to pare down those estimates which had so 
diverted her uncle and Mrs. Richie. With such practical 
preoccupations no wonder she was unconscious of the 
change in JBlair. Suddenly, like a stone flung through 
the darkness at a comfortably lighted domestic window, 
she saw, with a crash of fright, a new and unknown Blair, 
a man who was a complete and dreadful stranger. 

It was dusk; she had come in to see Nannie and talk 
over that illuminating suggestion: why not live on the 
principal? But Nannie was not at home, so Elizabeth 
sat down in the firelight in the parlor to wait for her. 
She sat there, smiling to herself, eager to tell Nannie 
that she had argued Cherry-pie into admitting that the 
plan of “living on the principal” was at least feasible; 
and also that she had sounded her uncle, and believed 
that if she and David and Cherry-pie attacked him, all 
together, they could make him consent!—“But of course 
David will simply have to insist,” she thought, a little 
apprehensively, “for Uncle Robert is so awfully sensible.” 
Then she began to plan just how she must tell David of 
this brilliant idea, and make him understand that they 
need not wait; “as soon as he really understands it, he 
won’t listen to any ‘prudence’ from Uncle!” she said, her 
eyes crinkling into a laugh. But how should she make 
him understand? She must admit at once (because 

20 £; 


THE IRON WOMAN 


he was so silly and practical) that, of course, the interest 
on her money would not support them. Then she must 
show him her figures—David was always crazy about 
figures! Well, she had them; she had brought them with 
her to show Nannie; they proved conclusively that she 
and David could live on her capital for at least two 
years. It would certainly last as long as that, perhaps 
even for two years and a half! When they had exhausted 
it, why, then, David’s income from his profession would 
be large enough; large enough even if—she blushed no¬ 
bly, sitting there alone looking into the fire; “even if!” 
Thinking this all out, absorbed and joyous, a little jealous 
because this practical idea had come to Nannie and not 
to her, she did not hear Blair enter. He stood beside her 
a moment in silence before she was aware of his presence. 
Then she looked up with a start, and leaning back in her 
chair, the firelight in her face, smiled at him: “Where’s 
Nannie?” 

“I don’t know. Church, I think. But I am glad of 
it. I would rather—see you alone.” His voice trembled. 

He had come in, in all the unrest of misery; he had said 
to himself that he was going to “tell Nannie, anyhow.” 
The impulse to “tell” had become almost a physical 
necessity, and when he came into the room, the whole 
unhappy, hopeless business was hot on his lips. The 
mere unexpectedness of finding her here, alone, was like 
a touch against that precariously balanced sense of 
honor, which was his god, and had so far kept him, as he 
expressed it to himself, “square with David.” 

To Elizabeth, sitting there in friendly idleness by the 
fire, the thrill in his voice was like some palpable touch 
against her breast. Without knowing why, she put her 
hand up, as if warding something off. She was be¬ 
wildered; her heart began to beat violently. Instantly, 
at the sight of the lovely, startled face, the rein broke. 
He forgot David, he forgot his god, with whom he had 
been juggling words for the last two months, he forgot 

206 


THE IRON WOMAN 


everything, except the single, eternal, primitive purpose: 
there was the woman he wanted. And all his life, if he 
had wanted anything, he had had it. With a stifled cry, 
he caught her hand: “Elizabeth—I love you!” 

“Stop!” she said, outraged and astounded; “stop this 
instant!” 

“I must speak to you.” 

“You shall not speak to me!” She was on her feet, 
trying with trembling fingers to put on her hat. 

“Elizabeth, wait!” he panted, “wait; listen—I must 
speak—” And before she knew it, he had caught her 
in his arms, and she felt his breath on her mouth. She 
pushed him from her, gasping almost, and looking at him 
in anger and horror. 

“How dare you?” 

“ Listen; only one minute!” 

“I will not listen one second. Let me out of this 
room—out of this house!” 

“Elizabeth, forgive me! I am mad!” 

“You are mad. I will never forgive you. Stand 
aside. Open the door.” 

“Elizabeth, I love you! I love you! Won’t you 
listen—?” 

But she had gone, flaming with anger and humiliation. 

When Nannie came in an hour later, her brother was 
sitting with his head bowed in his hands. The room 
was quite dark; the fire had died down. The fire of 
passion had died down, too, leaving only shame and 
misery and despair. His eyes, hidden in his bent arms, 
were wet; he was shaken to the depths of his being. For 
the first time in his life he had come against a thwarted 
desire. The education that should have been spread 
over his whole twenty-five years, an education that 
would have taught him how to meet the negations of life, 
of duty, of pity even, burst upon him now in one shatter¬ 
ing moment. He had broken his law, his own law; and, 
mercifully, his law was breaking him. 

X4 207 


THE IRON WOMAN 


When he rose to his feet as his sister came into the 
room, he staggered under the shock of such concentrated 
education. 

“Blair! What is it?” she said, catching his arm. 

“Nothing. Nothing. Tve been a fool. Let me go.” 

“But tell me! Fm frightened. Blair!” 

“It’s nothing, I tell you. Nannie! Will she ever 
look at me again ? Oh no, no; she will never forgive me! 
Why was I such a fool?” 

“ What are you talking about ?” poor Nannie said. It 
came into her head that he had suddenly gone out of 
his senses. 

Blair sank down again in a heap on his chair. 

“I’ve been a damned fool. I’m in love with Eliza¬ 
beth, and—and I told her so.” 


CHAPTER XVIII 


Of course, with that scene in the parlor, all the intima¬ 
cies of youth were broken short off; although between 
the two girls some sort of relationship was patched up. 
Nannie, thrown suddenly into the whirlpool of her 
brother’s emotions, was almost beside herself with dis¬ 
tress; she was nearly twenty-eight years old, but this 
was her first contact with the primitive realities of 
life. With that contact,—which made her turn away 
her horrified, virginal eyes; was the misery of knowing 
that Blair was suffering. She was ready to annihilate 
David, had such a thing been possible, to give her 
brother what he wanted. As David could not be made 
non-existent, she did her best to comfort Blair by try¬ 
ing to make Elizabeth forgive him. The very next day 
she came to plead that Blair might come himself to ask 
for pardon. Elizabeth would not listen: 

“Please don’t speak of it.” 

“But Elizabeth—” 

“I am perfectly furious, and I am very disgusted. 
I never want to see Blair again!” 

At which Blair’s sister lifted her head. 

“Of course, he ought not to have spoken to you, but I 
think you forget that he loved you long before David 
did.” 

“Nonsense!” Elizabeth cried out impatiently. 

But Nannie’s tears touched her. “Nannie, I can’t see 
him, and I won’t; but I’ll come and see you when he is 
not there.” At which Nannie flared again. 

“If you are angry at my brother, and can’t forgive 
209 


THE IRON WOMAN 


just a momentary, a passing feeling,—which, after all, 
Elizabeth, is a compliment; at least everybody says it’s 
a compliment to have a man say he loves you—” 

“Not if you’re engaged to another man!” Elizabeth 
burst in, scarlet to her temples. 

“ Blair loved you before David thought of you.” 

“Now, Nannie, don’t be silly.” 

“ If you can’t overlook it, because of our old friendship, 
you will have to drop me, too, Elizabeth.” 

Nannie was so pitiful and trembling that Elizabeth put 
her arms around her. “I’ll never drop you, dear old 
Nannie!” 

So, as far as the two girls were concerned, the habit 
of affection persisted; but Mrs. Maitland was not an¬ 
noyed by having Elizabeth present when Blair came to 
supper. 

Blair did not come to supper very often now; he did 
not come to the Works. “Is your brother sick?” Sarah 
Maitland asked her stepdaughter three or four days 
later. “He hasn’t been at his desk since Monday. 
What’s the matter with him?” 

“He is worried about something. Mamma.” 

“Worried? What on earth has he got to worry him?” 
she grunted. In her own worry she had come acrc»ss 
the hall to speak to Nannie, and find out, if she coffid, 
something about Blair. As she turned to go back to the 
dining-room, a little more uneasy than when she came in, 
her eye fell on that picture which Blair had left, a small 
oasis in the desert of Nannie’s parlor, and with her hand 
on the door-knob she paused to look at it. The sun was 
lying on the dark oblong, and in those illuminated depths 
maternity was glowing like a jewel. Sarah Maitland 
saw no art, but she saw divine things. She bent for¬ 
ward and looked deep into the picture; suddenly her 
eyes smiled until her whole face softened. “Why, look 
at his little foot,” she said, under her breath; “she’s 
holding it in her hand!” She was silent for a moment; 

210 


THE IRON WOMAN 


then she spoke as if to herself: “When Blair was as big 
as that, I bought him a pair of green morocco slippers. 
I don’t suppose you remember them, Nannie? They 
buttoned round the ankle; they had white china but¬ 
tons. He used to try to pick the buttons off.” She 
smiled again vaguely; then blinked as if awakening from 
a dream, and blew a long bubbling sigh through her 
closed lips; “ I can’t imagine why he doesn’t come to the 
office!” 

In the dining-room, as she took up her pen, she frowned. 
“Debt again?” she asked herself. But when, absorbed 
and irritable, Blair came into her office at the Works, and 
sat down at his desk to write endless letters that he tore 
up as soon as they were written, she did not ask for any 
explanation. She merely told Robert Ferguson to tell 
the bookkeeper to make a change in the pay-roll. “I’m 
going to raise Blair’s salary,” she said. Money was the 
only panacea Mrs. Maitland knew anything about. 

That next fortnight left its marks on Blair Maitland. 
People who have always had what they want, have a sort 
of irrational certainty of continuing to have what they 
want. It makes them a little unhumanly young. Blair’s 
face, which had been as irresponsible as a young faun’s, 
suddenly showed those scars of thwarted desire which 
mean age. There was actual agony in his sweet, shallow 
eyes, and with it the half-resentful astonishment of one 
who, being unaccustomed to suffering, does not know how 
to bear it. He grew very silent; he was very pale; in his 
pain he turned to his sister with an openness of emotion 
which frightened and shamed her; he had no self-control 
and no dignity. 

“ I must see her. I must, I must! Go and ask her to 
see me for a moment. I’ve disgusted her”—Nannie 
blushed; “but I’ll make her forgive me.” Sometimes 
he burst out in rages at David: “What does he know 
about love? What kind of a man is he for Elizabeth? 
She's a girl now, but if he gets her, God help him when 

2II 


THE IRON WOMAN 


she wakes up, a woman! Not that I mean to try to get 
her. Understand that. Nothing is farther from my 
mind than that. She belongs to him; I play fair. I 
don’t pretend to be a saint, but I play fair. I don’t cut 
in, when the man’s my friend. No; I just want to see 
her and ask her to forgive me. That’s all. Nannie, for 
God’s sake ask her if she won’t see me, just for five 
minutes!” 

He quivered with despair. Twice he went himself to 
Mr. Ferguson’s house. The first time Miss White wel¬ 
comed him warmly, and scuttled up-stairs saying she 
would “tell Elizabeth.” She came down again, very 
soberly. “Elizabeth is busy, Blair, and she says she 
can’t see you.” The next time he called he was told at 
the door that “Miss Elizabeth asks to be excused.” 
Then he wrote to her: “ All I ask is that you shall see me, 
so that I can implore you to pardon me.” 

Elizabeth tore the letter up and threw it into the fire. 
But she softened a little. “Poor Blair,” she said to her¬ 
self, “but of course I shall never forgive him.” 

She had not told David what Blair had done. “He 
would be furious,” she thought. “I’ll tell him later— 
when we are married”; at the word, the warm, beautiful 
wave of young love rose in her heart; “later, when I 
belong to him, I will tell him everything!” She would 
tell him everything just as she would give him every¬ 
thing; not that she had much to give him—only herself 
and her little money. That blessed money, on which he 
and she could live for two years,—she was going to give 
him that! For she and Nannie and Cherry-pie had de¬ 
cided that if the money were his, by a gift, then David, 
who was perfectly crazy and noble about independence, 
would feel that he and Elizabeth were living on his 
money, not hers. It was an artless and very feminine 
distinction, but serious enough to the three women who 
were all so young—Elizabeth, in fact, being the oldest, 
and Cherry-pie, at sixty-three, the youngest. And not 

212 


THE IRON WOMAN 


only had they discovered this way of overcoming David’s 
scruples about a shorter engagement, but Elizabeth had 
had another inspiration: why not be married on the very 
day that the money came into her possession? “Oh, 
splendid!” said Nannie; but she spoke with an effort, re¬ 
membering Blair. A little timidly, Elizabeth had told 
her uncle of this wonderful plan about the money. He 
snorted with amusement at her way of whipping the 
devil round the stump by a “gift” to David; but after 
a rather startled moment, although he w'ould not com¬ 
mit himself to a date, he was inclined to think an earlier 
marriage practicable. We are selfish creatures at best, 
all of us: Elizabeth’s way of being happy herself opened 
a possibility of happiness for her uncle. “Mrs. Richie 
can’t make David an excuse for saying ‘no,’ if the boy 
gets a home of his own,” he thought; and added to 
himself, “of course, when the child’s money is used up. 
I’ll help them out.” But to his niece he only barked 
wamingly: “Well, let’s hear what David has to say; he 
has some sense.” 

“Do you think there’s much doubt as to what he’ll 
say?” Elizabeth said; and the dimple deepened so en- 
trancingly that Robert Ferguson gave her a meager kiss. 
After securing this somewhat tentative consent, Eliza¬ 
beth and Cherry-pie decided that the next thing to do 
was to “make David write to uncle, and simply insist 
that the wedding shall be next month!” Her plan was 
very simple: when David came to Mercer to spend her 
birthday, he should receive, at the same moment, her 
money and herself. 

That future time of sacramental giving and of com¬ 
plete taking was in her thoughts with tenderness and 
shame and glory, as it is in the thought of every woman 
who loves and forgets herself. Yes, he could have her 
now; but he must take her money! That was the price 
he had to pay—the taking of her money. That it would 
be a high price to a man with his peculiarly intense feel- 

213 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ing about independence, Elizabeth knew; but he would 
be willing to pay it! Elizabeth could not doubt that. 
No price could be too high, he loved her so! She 
shivered with happiness at the thought of how he loved 
her; some soft impulse of passion made her lift her round 
wrist,—^that bitten wrist! to her mouth, and kiss it, hard. 
David had kissed it, many times! Yes; she was his if 
he would pay the price! She was going to tell him so, 
and then wait, gloTving, and shrinking, and eager, for him 
to come and “take her.” 

It was so true, so limpid, this noble flame that burned 
in her, that she almost forgot Blair’s behavior; the 
only thing she thought of was her plan, and the difficulty 
of putting it into the cold limits of pen and ink! But 
with much joyous underlining of important words she 
did succeed in stating it to him. She told him, not 
only the practical details, but with a lovely, untram¬ 
melled outpouring of her soul v/hich was sacrificial, she 
told him that she wanted to be his wife. She had no 
reserves; it was an elemental moment, and the matter of 
what is called modesty had no place in her ardent purity. 
It rarely has a place in organic impulses. In connection 
with death, or birth, or love, modesty is only a rather 
puerile self-consciousness. So Elizabeth, who had never 
been self-conscious in her life, told David, with perfect 
simplicity, that she “wanted to be married.” She said 
she had “worked the money part of it out,” and ac¬ 
cording to her latest estimate of how much, or rather 
how little, they could live on, it was possible. “You will 
say, we haven’t even as much as this,” she wrote, after 
she had stated what seemed to be the minimum income; 
then, triumphantly: *'we have! the money Uncle is 
going to give me on my birthday! If we live on it, 
instead of hoarding it up, it will last at least two years! 
I’ve talked to Uncle about it, and I’m pretty sure he will 
consent; but you’d better write and urge him,—just in¬ 
sist/** Then she approached the really difficult matter of 

214 


THE IRON \v^OMAN 


making David agree to live on money that was not his. 
She admitted that she knew how he felt on such matters. 
“And you are all wrong,” she declared candidly, “wrong, 
and a goose. But, so long as you do feel so, why, you 
needn’t any longer. For I am going to give the money 
to you. It is to be yours, not mine. You can’t refuse to 
use the money that is yours, that comes to you as a 
‘ gift ’ ? It will be as much yours as if somebody left it 
to you in their will, and you can bum it up, if you want 
to!” And when “business” had been written out, her 
heart spoke: 

“Dear” (she stopped to kiss the paper), “dear, I hope 
you won’t burn it up, because I am tired of waiting, and 
I hope you are too;”—when she wrote those last words, 
she was suddenly shy; “Uncle is to give me the money 
on my birthday—let us be married that day. I want 
to be married. I am all yours, David, all my soul, and 
all my mind, and all my body. I have nothing that is 
not yours to take; so the money is yours. No, I will 
not even give it to you! it belongs to you already—as I 
do. Dear, come and take it—and me. I love you—■ 
love you—love you. I want you to take me. I want to 
be your wife. Do you understand.? I want to belong 
to you. I am yours.” 

So she tried, this untutored creature, to put her soul 
and body into words, to write the thing that cannot even 
be spoken, whose utterance is silence. The mailing of 
the letter was a rite in itself; in the dusk, as she held the 
green lip of the post-box open, she kissed the envelope, 
as she had kissed the glowing sheet an hour before. She 
said to herself that she was “too happy to live!” As she 
said it, a wave of pity blotted out her usual shamed re¬ 
sentment at that poor mother of hers who had not been 
happy;—and whose lack of self-control was, Elizabeth 
believed, her legacy to her child. But her gravity was 
only for a moment; forgetting Blair, and the possible 

2IC 


THE IRON WOMAN 


chance of meeting him, she flew down to Nannie’s to 
tell her that the die had been cast—the letter had been 
written! Nannie, sitting by herself in the parlor, brood¬ 
ing over her brother’s troubles, was trying to draw; but 
Elizabeth brushed aside pencils and crusts of bread and 
india-rubbers, and flung her arms about her, pressing 
her face against hers and pouring the happy secret into 
her ear: 

“Oh, Nannie—I’ve told him! AVe’11 be married on 
my birthday. Go ahead and get your dress!” she said, 
breathlessly, and Nannie tried her best to be happy, too. 

For the next three days Elizabeth moved about in a 
half-dream, sometimes reddening suddenly; sometimes 
breathing a little quickly, with a faint fright in her eyes, 
—had she said too much ? would he understand ? Then 
a gush of confident love filled her like music. “ I couldn’t 
say too much! I want him to know that I feel—that way.” 

When David read that throbbing letter, he grew scar¬ 
let to his temples. There had been many moments dur¬ 
ing their engagement when Elizabeth, in slighter ways, 
had bared her soul to him, and always he had had the 
impulse to cover his eyes, as in a holy of holies. He had 
never, in those moments, dared to take advantage of 
such divine nakedness, even by a kiss. But she had 
never before trusted her passion to the coldness of pen 
and ink; it had had the accompaniment of eyes and 
lips, and eager, breaking voice. Perhaps if the letter 
had come at a different moment, he could more easily 
have called up that voice, and those humid eyes; he 
might have felt again the rose - pressure of the soft 
mouth. As it was, he read it in troubled preoccupation; 
then reddened sharply: he was a worthless cuss; he 
couldn’t stand on his own legs and get married like a 
man; his girl had to urge her uncle to let her support 
her lover! “Damn,” said David softly. 

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the 
reader’s frame of mind. David’s frame of mind when he 

216 


THE IRON WOMAIV 


read those words about urging Robert Ferguson, was not 
hospitable to other people’s generosity, for Elizabeth’s 
hot letter came on what had been, figuratively speaking, 
a very cold day. In the morning he had been repri* 
manded by the House officer for some slight forgetful- 
ness—a forgetfulness caused by his absorption in plan¬ 
ning an experiment in the laboratory. At noon he 
made the experiment, which, instead of crowning a 
series of deductions with triumphant proof, utterly 
failed. Then he had had pressing reminders of bills, still 
unpaid, for a pair of trousers and a case of instruments, 
and he had admitted to himself that he would have to 
ask his mother for the money to meet them. “I am a 
fizzle, all round,” he had told himself grimly. “Can’t 
remember an 3 rthing overnight. Can’t count on a dog¬ 
gone reaction. Can’t pay for my own pants! I won’t be 
able to marry for ten years. If Elizabeth is wise, she 
will throw me over. She’ll be tired of waiting for me, 
before I can earn enough to buy my instruments—let 
alone the shoe-strings Mr. Ferguson talked about!” 

Then her letter came. It was a spur on rowelied flesh. 
Elizabeth was tired of waiting! She said so. But she 
would help him; she had induced her uncle to consent 
that she should “give” him money; that she should, 
in fact, suppport him!—^just as his mother had been do¬ 
ing all his life. He was sore with disappointment at 
himself, yet, when he answered her letter his eyes stung 
at the thought of the loveliness of her love! He held 
her letter in his hand as he wrote, and once he put it to 
his lips. All the same he wrote, as he had to write, la¬ 
conically * 

“Dear Elizabeth,— Fm sure Mr. Ferguson will agree 
with me that your money cannot be mine, by any gift. 
Calling it so won’t make it so. Anyhow, it would not 
support us two years. By that time, as things look now, 
I shall probably not be earning any kind of an income, 

217 


THE IRON WOMAN 


I am soiry you are tired of waiting, but I can’t let you be 
imprudent. And apart from prudence, I could not re¬ 
spect myself if you supported me. It has been misery 
to me to have Materna saddled with a big, lazy brute of a 
fellow like me, who ought by this time to be taking 
care of you both. I am sure, if you think it over, you 
would be ashamed of me if I asked your uncle to help 
me out by letting you marry me now. Anyhow, I should 
be ashamed of myself. Well, the Lord only knows 
when I will come up to time! You might as well make 
up your mind to it that I’m a fizzle. I am discouraged 
with myself and everything else, and I see you are too; 
Heaven knows I don’t blame you. I know you think it 
is an awfully long time to wait, but it isn’t as long to 
you as it is to me. Dear, I love you; I can’t tell you 
how I love you. I haven’t words, as you have, but you 
know I do—and yet sometimes I feel as if I oughtn’t to 
marry you.” 

Elizabeth, running down the steps to meet the post¬ 
man, saw a familiar imprint on the corner of an envel¬ 
ope, and drew it from the pack before the good-natured 
man could hand it to her. 

“Guess you don’t want no Philadelphia letter?” he 
said slyly. 

“Of course I don’t!” she retorted; and the trudg¬ 
ing postman smiled for a whole block because of 
the light in her face. In the house, the letter in her 
hand, she stopped to hug Miss White. “ Cherry-pie! the 
letter has come. I’m to be married on my birthday!” 

“Oh, my lamb,” said Cherry-pie, “however shall I 
get things ready in time!” Elizabeth did not wait to 
help her in her housekeeping anxieties. She fled singing 
up to her room. 

“ Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful. 

Oh, that will be joyful. 

To meet to part no more!” 

218 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Then she opened the letter. . . . She read the last hnes 
with unseeing eyes; the first lines were branding them¬ 
selves into her soul. She folded the brief sheet with 
deliberation, and slowly put it back into the envelope. 
Then the color began to fall out of her face. Her eyes 
smoldered, glowed, then suddenly blazed: “He is sorry 
I am tired waiting.” 

Something warm, like a lifting tide of heat, was rising 
just below her breast-bone; it rose, and rose, and surged, 
until she gasped, and cried out hoarsely: “If ‘I think it 
over,* ril be ‘ashamed,’ will I? ‘Couldn’t respect him¬ 
self’? What about me respecting myself?” And the 
intolerable wave of heat still rose, swelling and bursting 
until it choked her; she was strangling! She clutched 
at her throat, then flung out clenched hands. “He 
‘can’t let’ me marry him? It’s ‘a long time for me ta 
wait ’ I I must ‘ make up my mind to it ’ 1 I hate him—• 
I want to kill him—I want to tear him! What did I tell 
him? ‘to come and take me’? And he doesn’t want 
me! And Nannie knows I told him to come, and Miss 
White and Uncle know it. And they will know he 
didn’t want me. Oh, how could I have told him I 
wanted him? I must kill him. I must kill myself—” 
Her wild outpouring of words was without sense or 
meaning to her. She shuddered violently, something 
crimson seemed to spread before her eyes, but the pallor 
of her face was ghastly. She began to pace up and 
down the room. Once she unfolded the letter, and 
glancing again at those moderate words, laughed loudly. 
“‘His,’” she said, “I told him I was *his’? I must 
have been out of my head. Well, I’ll ‘think it over!* 
ril ‘think it over!’—he needn’t worry about that. 
Oh, I could kill myself! And I told Cherry-pie I was 
going to be—” she could not speak the word. She 
stood still and gasped for breath. 

The paroxysm v/as so violent, and so long in coming 
to its height before there could be any ebb, that suddenly 
210 


the iron woman 


she reeled slightly. A gray mist seemed to roll up 
out of the corners of the room. She sank down on 
the floor, crumpling up against her bed. When she 
opened her eyes, the mist had gone, and she felt very 
stiff and a little sick. “Why, where am I?” she said 
aloud, “what’s the matter with me?” Then, dully, she 
remembered David’s letter. “ I was so angry I fainted,” 
she thought, in Hstless astonishment. For the moment 
she was entirely without feeling, neither angry, nor 
wounded, nor ashamed. Then, little by little, the dread¬ 
ful v/ave, which had ebbed, began to rise again. But now 
it was cold, not hot. She said to herself, quietly, that 
she would write to David Richie, and tell him she had 
‘thought it over’; and that neither she nor her money was 
his, or any further concern of his. “ He needn’t trouble 
himself; there would be no more ‘imprudence.* Oh, fool! 
fool! immodest fool I to have told him he ‘ could have her 
for the taking,’ and he said it was ‘long’ for her to wait!” 
It was an unbearable recollection, “His,” she had said; 
“soul and body.” She saw again the written words that 
she had kissed, and she had an impulse to tear the flesh 
of the lovely young body she had offered this man, and 
he had—declined. “Hwf” She blushed until she had 
to put her cold hands on her cheeks and forehead to ease 
the scorch. The modesty which a great and simple 
moment had obliterated came back with intolerable 
sharpness. 

By and by she got on her feet and dragged herself to a 
chair; she looked very wan and languid. For the mo¬ 
ment the fire was out. It had burned up precious 
things. 

“I’ll write to him to-morrow,” she thought. And 
through the cold rage she felt a hot stab of satisfaction; 
her letter—“a rather different letter, this time!” would 
make him suffer! But not enough. Not enough. She 
wished she could make him die, as she was dying. But 
she could not write at that moment; the idea of taking 
220 


THE IRON WOMAN 


up a pen turned her sick with the remembrance of what 
her pen had written three days before^ Instead of 
writing, she would go out and walk, and walk, and v/alk, 
and think how she could punish him—how she could kill 
him! Where should she go? Never mind! anywhere; 
anywhere. Just let her get out, let her be alone, where 
nobody could speak to her. How could she ever speak 
to people again? — to Miss White, who was dov/n in 
the dining-room, now, planning for the—wedding! To 
Nannie, who knew that David had been summoned, and 
who must be told that he refused to come; to Blair, who 
would guess—she paused, remembering that she was 
angry with Blair. There was a perceptible instant be* 
fore she could recollect why; when she did, she felt a 
pang of relief in her agony of humiliation. Blair, what¬ 
ever else he was, was a man, a man who could love a 
woman! It occurred to her that the girl Blair loved 
would not be thought immodest if she showed him how 
much she loved him. 

She began to put on her things to go out, and as she 
fastened her hat she looked at herself in the glass. “1 
have a wicked sort of face,” she thought, with a curious 
detachment from the situation which was almost that of 
an outside observer. She packed a small hand-bag, and 
then opened her purse to see if she had money enough to 
carry out a vague plan of going somewhere to spend the 
night, “to get away from people.” It was noon when 
she went down-stairs; in the hall she called to Miss 
White that she was going out. 

“But it’s just dinner-time, my lamb,” Miss White 
called back from the dining-room; “and I must talk to 
you about—” 

“I — I want to see Nannie,” Elizabeth said, in a 
smothered voice. It occurred to her that, later, she 
would go and tell Nannie that she had broken her en¬ 
gagement; it would be a satisfaction to do that, at 
any rate! 


221 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Oh, you’re going to take dinner with her?” Miss 
White said, peering out into the hall; “well, tell her to 
come in this afternoon and let us talk things over. 
There is so much to be done between now and the 
wedding,” Cherry-pie fretted happily. 

''Wedding!** Elizabeth said to herself; then slipped 
back the latch of the front door: “I sha’n’t come back 
until to-morrow.” 

“Oh, my Iambi” Miss White remonstrated, “I must 
ask you some questions about the wedding!” Then 
she remembered more immediate questions: “Is your 
satchel packed? Have you plenty of clean pocket- 
handkerchiefs? Elizabeth! be careful not to take cold, 
and ask Nannie how many teaspoons she can lend us—” 
The door slammed. It seemed to Elizabeth that she 
could never look Cherry-pie in the face again. She had a 
frantic feeling that if she could not escape from that 
intolerable insistence on the—the wedding, she would 
die. In the street, the mere cessation of Miss White’s 
joyous twittering was a relief. Well, she must go where 
she could be alone. She walked several blocks before 
she thought of Willis’s; it would take at least tw’O hours 
to get there, and she could think things over without 
interruption. She would think how she could save her 
self-respect before Miss White and her uncle and Nannie; 
and she would also think of some dreadful way, some 
terrible way to punish David Richie! Yes; she would 
walk out to Willis’s. . . . 

“Elizabeth!” some one said, at her elbow, and with a 
start she turned to see Blair. As they looked at each 
other, these two unhappy beings, each felt a faint pity 
for the other. Blair’s face was haggard; Elizabeth’s 
"was white to the point of ghastliness, but there was a 
smudge of crimson just below the glittering amber of her 
eyes. “Elizabeth!” he said, shocked, “what is it? 
You are ill! What has happened?” 

“Nothing. I—am tired.” She was so unconscious 
222 


IHE IRON WOMAN 


of everything but the maelstrom realization that she 
hated David that she did not remember that the hesitat¬ 
ing man beside her was under the ban of her displeasure. 
Her only thought was that she wished he would leave 
her to herself. 

“Dark day, isn’t it?” Blair said; but his voice broke 
in his throat. 

“I think we are going to have rain,” Elizabeth an¬ 
swered, mechanically. She was perfectly unaware of 
what she said, for at that moment she saw, on the other 
side of the street, the friendly postman who two hours 
ago had brought her David Richie’s insult; now, his 
empty pouch over his shoulder, he was trudging back to 
the post-office. Against the clamoring fury of her 
thoughts and the instant vision of David’s letter, Blair’s 
presence was no more to her than the brush of a wing 
across the surface of a torrent. 

As for Blair, he was dazed, and then ecstatic. She 
had not sent him away! She was perfectly matter-of- 
fact! think we are going to have rainy* She must 

have forgiven him! “May I walk home with you, 
Elizabeth?’’ he said breathlessly. 

“ I’m not going home. I am—^just walking.” 

“So am I,” he said. He had got himself in hand by 
this time; every faculty was alert; he had his chance to 
ask for pardon! “Come out to Mrs. Todd’s, and have 
some pink ice-cream. Elizabeth, do you remember the 
paper roses on those dreadful marble-topped tables that 
were sort of semi-transparent?” 

Elizabeth half smiled. “I had forgotten them; how 
horrid they were!” With the surface of her mind she 
was conscious that his presence was a relief; it was like 
a veil between her and the flames. 

Blair, watching her furtively, said: “I’ll treat. Come 
along, let’s have a spree!” 

“You always did do the treating,” she said absently. 
Blair laughed. The primitive emotions are always 

15 


THE IRON WOMAN 


naked; but how inevitably most of us try to cover them 
with the fig-leaf of trivial speech—a laugh, perhaps, or a 
question about the weather; somehow, in some way, the 
nakedness must be covered! So now. Love and Hate, 
walking side by side in Mercer’s murky noon, were for 
the moment hidden from each other. Blair laughed, 
and said he would make her “treat” for a change, and 
she replied that she couldn’t afford it. 

At the toll-house he urged again, with gay obstinacy. 
“Oh, come in! You needn’t eat the stuff, but just for 
the fun of the thing; Mrs. Todd will be charmed to see us. 
I’m sure.” 

“Well,” Elizabeth agreed; for a moment the vapid 
talk was like balm laid upon burnt flesh. Then sud¬ 
denly she remembered how David had sprung up that 
snowy path to the toll-house, to knock on the window 
and cry, “I’ve got her!” Ah, he was a little too sure; 
a little too sure! She was not so easy to get as all that, 
not so cheap as he seemed to think—though she had 
offered herself; had even told him she was “tired of 
waiting”! (And at home Cherry-pie was counting the 
teaspoons for the wedding breakfast.) 

Blair heard that fierce intake of her breath, and quiv¬ 
ered without knowing why. “Yes, let us go!” Eliza¬ 
beth said fiercely. At least this chuckling old woman 
should see that David had not “got her”; she should 
see her with Blair, and know that there were men in the 
world who cared for her, if David Richie did not. 

Mrs. Todd was not at home; perhaps, if she had 
been. ... 

But instead of the big, motherly old figure, beaming at 
them from the toll-house door, a slatternly maid-servant 
said her mistress was out. “We ain’t doin’ much cream 
now,” she said, wrapping her arms in her apron and 
shivering; “it’s too cold. I ain’t got anything but 
vanilla.” 

“We’ll have vanilla, then,” Blair said, in his rather 

224 


THE IRON WOMAN 


courtly way, and the girl, opening the door of the ' " sa¬ 
loon/* scurried off. “By Jove!'* said Blair, “I believe 
these are the identical blue paper roses—look at them!’’ 

She sat down wearily. “ I believe they are,” she said, 
and began to pull off her gloves. Outside in the toll¬ 
house garden the frosted stems of last summer’s flowers 
stood upright in the snow. She remembered that Mrs. 
Todd’s geraniums had been glowing in the window that 
winter day when David had shouted his triumphant 
news. Probably they were dead now. Everything else 
was dead. 

“ Still the tissue-paper star on the ceiling!” Blair cried, 
gaily, “yes, everything is just the samel” And indeed, 
when the maid, glancing with admiring eyes at the 
handsome gentleman and the cross-looking lady, put 
down on the semi-translucent marble top of the table 
two tall glasses of ice-cream, each capped with its dull 
and dented spoon, the past was completely reproduced. 
As the frowsy little waitress left them, they looked at the 
pallid, milky stuff, and then at each other, and their 
individual preoccupations thinned for a moment. Blair 
laughed; Elizabeth smiled faintly: 

“You don’t expect me to eat it, I hope?” 

“ I won’t make you eat it. Let’s talk.” 

But Elizabeth took up her gloves. “I must go, 
Blair.” 

He pushed the tumblers aside and leaned toward her; 
one hand gripped the edge of the table until the knuckles 
were white; the other was clenched on his knee. “Eliza¬ 
beth,” he said, in a low voice, “have you forgiven me?” 

“Forgiven you? What for?” she said absently; 
then remembered and looked at him indifferently. “ Oh, 
I suppose so. I had forgotten.” 

“ I would’nt have done it if I hadn’t loved you. You 
know that.” 

She was silent. 

“Do you hate me for loving you?” 

22 5 


THE IRON WOMAN 


On Elizabeth’s cheeks the smudge of crimson began 
to flame into scarlet. “I don’t hate you. I think you 
were a fool to love me. I think anybody is a fool to love 
anybody.” 

In a flash Blair understood. She had quarrelled with 
David! 

It seemed as if all the blood in his body surged into his 
throat; he felt as if he were suffocating; but he spoke 
quietly. “Don’t say I was a fool; say I am a fool, if 
you want to. Because I love you still. I love you now. 
I shall never stop loving you.” 

Elizabeth glanced at him with a sort of impersonal 
interest. So that was the way a man might love ? “Well, 
I am sorry for you, Blair. I’m sorry, because it hurts 
to love people who don’t love you. At least, I should 
think it did. I don’t love anybody, so I don’t know 
much about it.” 

“You have broken with David,” he said slowly. 

“How did you know?” she said, with a surprised look; 
then added listlessly, “ Yes; I’ve done with David. I hate 
him.” She looked blankly down at her muff, and began 
to stroke the fur. It occurred to her that before going 
to Willis’s she must see Nannie, or else she would have 
told Miss V/hite a lie; again the double working of her 
mind interested her; rage, and a desire to be truthful, 
were like layers of thought. She noted this, even while 
she was saying again, between set teeth, “ I hate 
him.” 

“He has treated you badly,” Blair said. 

“How did you know?” she said, startled. 

“ I know David. What does a man like David know 
about loving a woman ? He would talk his theories and 
standards to her, when he could be silent—in her arms!” 
He flung out his hand and caught her roughly by the 
v/jpist. “Elizabeth, for God’s sake, marry me'' 

/ He had risen and was leaning toward her, his fingers 
gripped her wrist like a trap, his breath was hot against 
226 



ELiZABETH, MAKRY ME 1” Page 226. 














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THE IRON WOMAN 

her neck, his eyes glowed into hers. “Marry—me, 
Elizabeth/* 

The moment was primal; the intensity of it was like 
a rapier-thrust, down through her fury to the quick of 
womanly consciousness; she shrank back. “Don’t,** 
she said, faintly; “don’t—*’ For one instant she forgot 
that she hated David. Instantly he was tender. 

“Dearest, dearest, I love you. Be my wife. Eliza¬ 
beth, I have always loved you, always; don’t you remem¬ 
ber ?’* He was kneeling beside her, lifting the hem of her 
skirt and kissing it, murmuring crazy words; but he did 
not touch her, which showed that the excuse of passion 
was not yet complete. And indeed it was not, for some¬ 
where in the tumult of his mind he was defending him- 
himself—perhaps to his god: “7 have the right. It’s 
all over between them. Any man has the right now.*’ 
Then, aloud: “Elizabeth, I love you. I shall love you 
forever. Marry me. Now. To-night.’’ When he said 
that, it was as if he had struck his god upon the mouth 
—for the accusing Voice ceased. And when it ceased, 
he no longer defended himself. Elizabeth looked at him, 
dazed. “No, I know you don’t care for me, now,*’ he 
said. “Never mind that! I will teach you to care; I 
will teach you—” he whispered: “the meaning of love! 
He couldn’t teach you; he doesn’t know it himself; he 
doesn’t”—he was at a loss for a word; some instinct 
gave him the right one—“want you.” 

It was the crack of the whip! She answered it with 
a look of hate. But still she was silent. 

“You love him,” he flung at her. 

“I do not. T hate him! hate him! hate him! I wish 
he were dead in this room, so I could trample on him!'* 
Even in the scorch of that insane moment, Blair Mait¬ 
land flinched at such a declaration of hate. Hate like 
that is the left hand of Love. He had sense enough 
left in his madness to know that, and he could have 
killed David because he was jealous of such precious hate. 

227 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Yom’ll get over that/' he assured her; neither of 
them saw in such an assurance the confession that he 
knew she loved David still. And still his smitten god 
was silent! “You—you hate him because he slighted 
you/’ Blair said, stammering with passion. “But for 
God’s sake, Elizabeth, show him that you hate him. 
Since he despises you, despise him! Will you let him 
slap you in the face, and still love him?” 

“I do not love him.’’ 

They were both standing; Elizabeth, staring at him 
with unseeing eyes, seemed to be answering some fierce 
interrogation in her own thought: What? was this the 
way to kill David Richie ? That it would kill her, too, 
never occurred to her. If it had occurred to her, it 
would have seemed worth while—well worth while! 

“Then why do you let him think you love him?” 
Blair was insisting, in a violent whisper, “why do you let 
him think you are under his heel still? Show him you 
hate him—if you do hate him? Marry me, that will 
show him.** 

They were standing, now, facing each other—Love and 
Hate. Love, radiant, with glorious eyes, with beautiful 
parted lips, with outstretched hands that prayed, and 
threatened, and entreated: “ Come! I must have you,— 
God, I must!** And Hate, black-browed, shaking from 
head to foot, with dreadful set stare, and hands clenched 
and trembling; hands that reached for a dagger to thrust, 
and thrust again! Hands reaching out and finding the 
dagger in that one, hot, whispered word: “Come.” Yes; 
that would “show him”! 

“When?” she said, trembling. 

And he said, “ Now.” 

Elizabeth flung up her head with a look of burning 
satisfaction. 

**Come!** she said; and laughing wildly, she struck 
her hand into his. 


CHAPTER XIX 


When Robert Ferguson came in to luncheon the next 
day, he asked for Elizabeth. “She hasn’t come home 
yet from Nannie’s,” Miss White told him^ “I thought 
she would be here immejetly after breakfast. I can’t 
imagine what keeps her, though I suppose they have a 
great deal to talk over!” 

“Well, she’ll have to wait for her good news,” Mr. 
Ferguson said; and handed a telegram to Miss White, 
“ Despatch from David. He’s bringing a patient across 
the mountains to-night; says he’ll turn up here for 
breakfast. He’ll have to go back on the ten-o’clock 
train, though.” 

Cherry-pie nibbled with excitement, “I guess he just 
had to come and talk the arrangements over with her!” 

“What arrangements?” Mr. Ferguson asked, vaguely; 
when reminded by Miss White, he looked a little startled. 
“Oh, to be sure; I had forgotten.” Then he smiled: 

“Well, I suppose I shall have to say ‘yes.’ I think 
I’ll go East myself next week!” he added, fatuously; but 
the connection was not obvious to Miss White. 

“Elizabeth got a letter from him yesterday,” she said, 
beaming; “they’ve decided on her birthday—if you are 
willing.” 

“Willing? I guess it’s a case of ‘he had to be re¬ 
signed!’ ” said Robert Ferguson—thinking of that trip 
East, he was positively gay. But Cherry-pie’s romance 
lapsed into household concerns: “We must have some¬ 
thing the boy likes for breakfast.” 

“Looking at Elizabeth will be all the breakfast he 
229 


THE IRON WOMAN 


wants/’ Elizabeth’s uncle said, with his meager chuckle. 
“ David’s as big a donkey as any of ’em, though he hasn’t 
the gift of gab on the subject.” 

When he had gone to his office, Miss White propped 
the telegram up on the table, so that Elizabeth’s eyes 
might brighten the moment she opened the front door 
But to her dismay, Elizabeth did not open the door al] 
that afternoon. Instead came a note, plainly in her 
hand, addressed to Mr. Ferguson. “Why! she is send¬ 
ing word that she’s going to stay all night again 
with Nannie,” Miss White thought, really disturbed. If 
such a thing had been possible. Cherry-pie would 
have been vexed with her beloved “lamb,” for after 
all, Elizabeth really ought to be at home attending 
to things! Miss White herself had spent every minute 
since the wonderful news had been flung at her, in attend¬ 
ing to things. She had made a list of the people who 
must be invited to the wedding, she had inspected the 
china-closet, she had calculated how many teaspoons 
would be needed,—“Better borrow some forks from 
Nannie, too,” she said, beginning, like every good house¬ 
keeper, to look careworn. “There’s so much to be 
done!” said Cherry-pie, excitedly. Yet this .scatter¬ 
brain girl evidently meant to stay away from home still 
another night. “ Well, she can’t, that’s all there is to it!” 
Miss White said, decidedly; “she must come home, so as 
to be here in the morning when David arrives. Per¬ 
haps I’d better go down to Mrs. Maitland’s and take 
her the despatch.” 

She was getting ready to go, when the first rumble of 
the hurricane made itself heard. Nannie dropped in, 
and— 

“‘Where's Elizabeth.^’ I’m sure I don’t know. Isn’t 
she at home? ‘Stayed with me last night?’ Why, no, 
she didn’t. I haven’t seen Elizabeth for two days, 
and—” 

Nanme sprang to catch poor old Miss White, who 
230 


THE IRON WOMAN 


reeled, and then tried, as she sank into a chair, to speak; 
“What? What? Not with you last night? Nanniet 
She must have been. She told me she was going—” 
Miss White grew so ghastly that Nannie, in a panic^. 
called a servant. 

“Send for her uncle!” the poor lady stammered. 
“Send—send. Oh, what has happened to my child?” 
Then she remembered the letter addressed to Mr. Fer¬ 
guson, lying on the table beside David’s telegram. “Per¬ 
haps that will say where she is. Oh, tell him to hurry!** 

When Robert Ferguson reached home he found the 
two pallid, shaking women waiting for him in the hall. 
Miss White, clutching that unopened letter, tried to 
tell him: Elizabeth had not been at Nannie’s; she had 
not come home; she had— 

“Give me the letter,” he said. They watched him 
tear it open and run his eye over it; the next instant he 
had gone into his library and slammed the door in their 
faces. 

Outside in the hall the trembling women looked at 
each other in silence. Then Nannie said with a gasp, 
“She must have gone to—to some friend’s.” 

“ She has no friend she would stay all night with but 
you.” 

“Well, you see she has written to Mr. Ferguson, so 
there can’t be anything much the matter; he’ll tell us 
where she is, in a minute! If he can’t. I’ll make Blair 
go and look for her. Dear, dear Miss White, don’t cry!” 

“There has been an accident. Oh, how shall we tell 
David? He’s coming to-morrow to talk over the wed¬ 
ding, and—” 

The library door opened: “ Miss White.” 

“Mr. Ferguson! Where—? What—?” 

“Miss White, that—creature, is never to cross my 
threshold again. Do you understand me? Never 
again. Nannie, your brother is a scoundrel. Read 
that.” He flung the letter on the floor between them., 
2.^1 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and went back to his library. They heard the key turn 
in the lock. Miss White stared at the shut door blankly; 
Nannie picked up the letter. It was headed “The 
Mayor’s Office,” and was dated the day before; no 
address was given. 

“Dear Uncle Robert: I married Blair Maitland this 
afternoon. David did not want me. E. F.” 

They read it, looked at each other with astounded 
eyes, then read it again. Nannie was the first to find 
words. 

“I—don’t understand.” 

Miss White was dumb; her poor upper lip quivered 
wildly. 

“She and David are to be married,” Nannie stam¬ 
mered. “How can she marry—anybody else? I don’t 
understand.” 

Then Miss White broke out. “/ understand. Oh, 
wicked boy! My child, my lamb! He has killed my 
child Elizabeth!” 

“Who has? What do you mean? What are you 
talking about!” 

“He has lured her away from David,” the old woman 
wailed shrilly. “Nannie, Nannie, your brother is an 
evil, cruel man—a false man, a false friend. Oh, my 
lamb! my girl!” 

Nannie, staring at her with horrified eyes, was silent. 
Miss White sank down on the floor, her head on the 
lowest step of the staircase; she was moaning to herself: 
“They quarrelled about something, and this is what she 
has done! Oh, she was mad, my lamb, my poor lamb! 
She was crazy; David made her angry; I don’t know how. 
And she did this frightful thing. Oh, I always knew she 
would do some terrible thing when she was angry!” 

Nannie looked at the closed door of the library, then 
at Miss White, lying there, crying and moaning to her- 
232 


THE IJRON WOMAN 


self witn her poor old head on the stairs; once she tried 
to speak, but Miss White did not hear her; it was in« 
tolerable to see such pain. Blair’s sister, ashamed with 
his shame, stammered something, she did not know 
what, then opening the front door, slipped out into the 
dusk. The situation was so incredible she could not 
take it in. Blair and Elizabeth— married? She kept 
saying it over and over. But it was impossible! 
Elizabeth was to marry David on her birthday. “I 
feel as if I were going out of my mind!” Nannie told 
herself, hurrying dowm into Mercer’s black, noisy heart. 
When she reached the squalor of Maitland’s shantytown 
and saw the great old house on the farther side of the 
street, looming up on its graded embankment, black 
against a smoldering red sunset, she was almost sobbing 
aloud, and when Harris answered her ring, she was in 
such tension that she burst out at him: “Harris! where 
is Mr. Blair? Do you know? Have you heard—any* 
thing?” She seized the old man’s arm and held on to it. 

Where is Mr. Blair, Harris?” 

“My laws. Miss Nannie! how do I know? Ain’t he at 
the hotel? There’s a letter come for you; it come just 
after you went out. Looks like it was from him. There, 
now, child! Don’t you take on like that! I guess if 
Mr. Blair can write letters, there ain’t much wrong 
with him.” 

When he brought her the letter, she made him wait 
there in the dimly lighted hall until she opened it, she 
had a feeling that she could not read it by herself. “Oh, 
Harris!” she said, and began to tremble; “it’s true! He 
did. . . . They are—oh, Harris!” And while the old 
man drew her into the parlor, and scuffled about to light 
the gas and bring her a glass of w’ater, she told him, 
brokenly—she had to tell somebody—what had hap¬ 
pened. Harris’s ejaculations were of sheer amazement, 
untouched by disapproval: “Mr. Blair? Married to 
Miss Elizabeth? My land! There! He always did git 

233 


THE IRON WOMAN 


in ahead His astounded chuckle was as confusing as 
all the rest of it. Nannie, standing under the single 
flaring jet of gas, read the letter again. It was, at any 
rate, more enlightening than Elizabeth’s to her uncle: 

“Dear Nannie; Don’t have a fit when I tell you Eliza¬ 
beth and I are married. She had a row with David, 
and broke her engagement with him. We were married 
this afternoon. I’m afraid mother won’t like it, because, 

I admit, it’s rather sudden. But really it is the easiest 
way all round, especially for—other people. It’s on 
the principle of having your tooth pulled quick !—^if you 
have to have it pulled, instead of by degrees. I’ll 
amount to something, now, and that will please mother. 
You tell her that I will amount to something now! I 
want you to tell her about it before I write to her myself 
—which, of course. I shall do to-morrow—^because it will 
be easier for her to have it come from you. Tell her 
marrying Elizabeth will make a business man of me. 
You must tell her as soon as you get this, because prob¬ 
ably it wiU be in the newspapers. I feel like a cur, 
asking you to break it to her, because, of course, it’s 
sort of difficult. She won’t like it, just at first; she 
never likes anything I do, But it will be easier for her 
to hear it first from you. Oh, you dear old Nancy!— 
I am nearly out ol my head, I’m so happy. . . . 

“P S, We are going off for a month or so. I’ll let 
you know where to address us when I know myself.” 

Nannie dropped down into a chair, and tried to get 
her wits together. If Elizabeth had broken with David, 
why, then, of course, she could marry Blair; but why 
should she marry him right away? “It isn't—decent!” 
said Nannie. And when did she break with David? 
Only day before yesterday she was expecting to marry 
him, “It is horrible!’' &aid Nannie, and her recoil of 
disgust for a moment included Blair But the habit of 

2^4 


THE IRON WOMAN 


love made her instant with excuses: “It's worse in 
Elizabeth than in him. Mamma will say so, too 
Then she felt a shock of terror: “Mamma!" She 
smoothed out the letter, crumpled in her shaking hand, 
and read it again: “T want you to tell her—' Oh, I 
can't!*' Nannie said; “ ‘it will be easier for her to have it 
come from you—' And what about me?" she thought, 
with sudden, unwonted bitterness; “it won’t be ‘easy’ 
for me." 

She began to take off her things; then realized that 
she was shivering. The few minutes of stirring the fire 
which was smoldering under a great lump of coal 
between the brass jambs of the grate, gave her the 
momentary relief of occupation; but when she sat down 
in the shifting firelight, and held her trembling hands 
toward the blaze, the shame and fright came back 
again. “Poor David!" she said; but even as she said it 
she defended her brother; “if Elizabeth had broken 
with him, of course Blair had a right to marry her. But 
how could Elizabeth! I can never forgive her!" Nannie 
thought, wincing with disgust. “To be engaged to 
David one day, and marry Blair the next!—Oh, Blair 
ought not to have done it," she said, involuntarily; and 
hid her face in her hands. But it was so intolerable to 
her to blame him, that she drove her mind back to Eliza¬ 
beth’s vulgarity; she could bear what had happened if 
she thought of Blair as a victim and not as an of¬ 
fender. 

“I can never feel the same to Elizabeth again," she 
said. Then she remembered what her brother had 
bidden her do, and quailed. For a moment she was 
actually sick with panic. Then she, too, knew the 
impulse to get the tooth pulled “quick." She got up 
and went swiftly across the hall to the dining-room, It 
was empty, except for Harris, who was moving some 
papers from the table to set it for supper. 

“Oh. Harris," she said, with a gasp of relief, “she isn’t 

235 


THE IRON WOMAN 


here! Harris, I have got to tell her. You don’t tnink 
she’ll mind much, do you?"' 

But by this time Harris's chuckling appreciation of 
Mr. Blair’s cleverness in getting in ahead had evapo¬ 
rated. “My, my, my, Miss Nannie!” he said, his weak 
blue eyes blinking with fright, “/ wouldn’t tell her, not 
if you’d gimme the Works!” 

“Harris, it you were in my place, would you try to, 
at supper?” 

“Now, Miss, how can I tell? She’ll be wild; my, my; 
wild!” 

“I don’t see why. Mr. Blair had a right to get mar¬ 
ried.” 

“He’d ought to have let on to her about it,” Harris 
said. 

For a few minutes Nannie was stricken dumb. Then 
she sought encouragement again: “Perhaps if you had 
something nice for supper, she’d be—pleased, you 
know, and take it better?” 

“There’s to be cabbage. Maybe that will soften her 
up. She likes it; gor, how she likes cabbage!” said 
Harris, almost weeping. 

“Harris, how do you think she’ll take it?” 

“She won’t take it well,” the old man said. “Miss 
Elizabeth was Mr. David’s girl. When I come to think 
it over, I don’t take it well myself. Miss Nannie. Nor 
you don’t, neither. No, she won’t take it well.” 

“But Miss Elizabeth had broken with Mr. David,” 
Nannie defended her brother; “Mr. Blair had a right—” 
then she shivered. “But Fve got to tell her! Oh, 
Harris, I think she wouldn’t mind so much, if he told 
her himself?” 

Harris considered. “Yes, Miss, she would. Mr. 
Blair don’t put things right to his ma. He’d say some¬ 
thing she wouldn’t like. He’d say something about some 
of his pretty truck. Them things always make her 
mad. That picture he bought—-the lady nursin the 
2^6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


baby, in your parlor; she ain’t got over that yet. Oh, 
no, she’ll take it better from you. You be pretty with 
her. Miss Nannie. She likes it when you’re pretty with 
her. I once seen a chippy sittin’on a cowcatche-:; well, 
it made me think o’ you and her. You be prett)^ to her, 
and then tell her, kind of—of easy,” Harris ended weakly. 

Easy! It was all very well to say “^asy”; Harris 
might as well say knock her down “easy.” At that 
moment the back door banged. 

Mrs. Maitland burst into the room in intense pre¬ 
occupation ; the day had been one of absorbing interest, 
culminating in success, and she was alert with satis¬ 
faction. “Harris, supper! Nannie, take my bonnet! 
Is your brother to be here to-night? I’ve something to 
tell him! Where’s the evening paper?” 

Nannie, breathless, took the forlorn old bonnet, and 
said, “I—I think he isn’t coming. Mamma.” Harris 
came running with the newspaper; they exchanged a 
frightened glance, although the mistress of the house, 
with one hand on the carving-knife, was already saying, 
“Bless, O Lord—” 

At supper Mrs. Maitland, eating—as the grocer said so 
long ago, “like a day-laborer”—read her paper. Nannie 
watching her, ate nothing at all and said nothing at all. 

When the coarse, hurried meal was at an end, and 
Harris, blinking with horrified sympathy, had shut him¬ 
self into his pantry, Nannie said, faintly, “Mamma, I 
have something to tell you.” 

“I guess it will keep, my dear, I guess it will keep! 
I’m too busy just now to talk to you.” She crumpled 
up her newspaper, flung it on the floor, and plunged 
over to her desk. 

Nannie looked helplessly at the back of her head, then 
went off to her parlor. She sat there in the firelit dark¬ 
ness, too distracted and frightened to light the gas, 
planning how the news must be told. At eight o’clock 
there was a fluttering, uncertain ring at the front door, 

237 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and Cherry-pie came quivering in: had Nannie heard 
anything more? Did she know where they were? “I 
asked hsr uncle to come down here and see if Mrs. Mait¬ 
land had heard an3rthing, but—he was dreadful, Nannie, 
dreadful! He said he would see the whole family in—I 
can’t repeat where he said he would see them!” She 
broke down and cried; then, crouching at Nannie’s side, 
she read Blair’s letter by the uncertain light of the fire. 
After that, except for occasional whispered ejaculations 
of terror and pain, they were silent, sitting close together 
like two frightened birds; sometimes a lump of coal 
split apart, or a hissing jet of gas bubbled and flamed 
between the bars of the grate, and then their two 
shadows flickered gigantic on the wall behind them; 
but except for that the room was very still. When the 
older woman rose to go, Nannie clung to her: 

“Oh, won’t you tell her? Please—please!” Poor 
old Miss White could only shake her head: 

“I can’t, my dear, I can't! It would not be fitting. 
Do it now, my dear; do it immejetly, and get it over.” 

When Cherry-pie had wavered back into the night, 
Nannie gathered up her courage to “get it over.” She 
went stealthily across the hall; but at the dining-room 
door she stood still, her hand on the knob, not daring to 
enter. Strangely enough, in the midst of the absorbing 
distress of the moment, some trick of memory made her 
think of the little ’fraid-cat, standing outside that door, 
trying to find the courage to open it and get for Blair— 
for whose sake she stood there now—^the money for his 
journey all around the world! In spite of her terror, she 
smiled faintly; then she opened the door and looked in. 
Mrs. Maitland was still at work, and she retreated noise¬ 
lessly. At eleven she tried again. 

Except for the single gas-jet under a green shade that 
hung above the big desk, the room was dark. Mrs. 
Maitland was in her chair, writing rapidly; she did not 
hear Nannie’s hesitating footstep, or know that she was 
2.^8 


THE IRON WOMAN 


in the room, until the girl put her hand on the arm of 
her chair. 

“Mamma.^^ 

“Yes?’^ 

“Mamma, I have something to—^to tell you.” 

Mrs. Maitland signed her name, put her pen behind 
her ear, flung a blotter down on the heavily written page, 
and rubbed her fist over it. “ Well ?” she said cheerfully: 
and glanced up at her stepdaughter over her steel-rimmed 
spectacles, with kind eyes; “ what are you awake for, at 
this hour?” Then she drew out a fresh sheet of paper, 
and began to write: “My dear Sir:—Yours received, and 
con—” 

“Mamma . . . Blair is married.” 

The pen made a quick, very slight upward movement, 
there was a spatter of ink; then the powerful, beautiful 
hand went on evenly “—tents noted,” She rubbed the 
blotter over this line, put the pen in a cup of shot, and 
turned around. '^What did you say?’* 

“I said . o , Blair is married.” 

Silence. 

“He asked me to tell you,” 

Silence. 

“ He hopes you will not be angr}^-. He says he is going 
to be a—a tremendous business man, now, because he is 
so happy.” 

Silence. Then, in a loud voice: “How long has this 
been going on?” 

“Oh, Mamma, not any time at all, truly! I am 
perfectly sure it—^it was on the spur of the moment.” 

“ Married, * on the spur of the moment' ? Good God 1” 

“ I only mean he hasn’t been planning it. He—” 

“And what kind of woman has married him, ‘on the 
spur of the moment ’ ?” 

“Oh,—Mamma . . 

Her voice was so terrified that Mrs. Maitland sud¬ 
denly looked at her. “Don’t be frightened, Nannie/* 

16 239 


THE IRON WOMAN 


she said kindly. “What is it? You have something 
more to tell me, I can see that. Come, out with it! Is 
she bad?” 

“Oh, Mamma! don’t! don’t! It is^—she is—Eliza- 
beth—” 

Then she fled. 

That night, at about two o’clock, Mrs. Maitland en¬ 
tered her stepdaughter’s room. Nannie was dozing, but 
started up in her bed, her heart in her throat at the sight 
of the gaunt figure standing beside her. Blair’s mother 
had a candle in one hand, and the other was curved 
about it to protect the bending flame from the draught 
of the open door; the light flickered up on her face, and 
Nannie was conscious of how deep the wrinkles were on 
her forehead and about her mouth. 

“Nannie, tell me everything.” 

She put the candle on the table at the head of the bed, 
and sat down, leaning forward a little, as if a weight 
were resting on her shoulders. Her clasped hands, hang¬ 
ing loosely between her knees, seemed, in the faint light 
of the small, pointed flame, curiously shrunken and 
withered. “Tell me,” she said heavily. 

Nannie told her all she knew. It was little enough. 

“How do you know that Elizabeth had broken with 
David Richie?” her stepmother said. Nannie silently 
handed her Blair’s letter. Mrs. Maitland took up her 
candle, and holding it close to the flimsy sheet, read her 
son’s statement. Then she handed it back. “I see; 
some sort of a squabble; and Blair—” She stopped, 
almost with a groan. “His friend,"' she said, and her 
chin shook; “your father’s son!” she said brokenly. 

“Mamma!” Nannie protested—she was sitting up in 
bed, her hair in its two braids falling over her white night¬ 
dress, her eyes, so girlish, so tiightened, fixed on that 
quivering iron face; “Mamma! remember, he was in 
love with Elizabeth long ago, before David ever thought—’* 

240 


THE IRON WOMAN 


In love with Elizabeth ? He was never in love with 
anybody but himself.” 

“Oh, Mamma, please forgive him! It’s done now, 
and it can’t be undone.” 

“What has my forgiveness got to do with it? It’s 
done, as you say. It can’t be undone. Nothing can be 
undone. Nothing; nothing. All the years that remain 
cannot undo the years that I have been building this 
up.” 

Nannie stared at her blankly. And suddenly the hard 
face softened. “Lie down. Go to sleep.” She put 
her big roughened hand gently on the girl’s head. “Go 
to sleep, my child.” She took up her candle, and a 
moment later Nannie heard the stairs creak under her 
heavy tread. 

Sarah Maitland did not sleep that night; but after the 
first outburst, when Nannie had panted out, “It is— 
Elizabeth,” and then fled, there had been no anger. 
When the door closed behind her stepdaughter, Blair’s 
mother put her hand over her eyes and sat perfectly still 
at her desk. Blair was married. And he had not told 
her,—that was the first thought. Then, into the piti¬ 
ful, personal dismay of mortification and wounded love, 
came the sword-thrust of a second thought: he had 
stolen his friend’s wife. 

It was not a moment for nice discriminations; the 
fact that Elizabeth had not been married to David 
seemed immaterial. This was because, to Sarah Mait¬ 
land’s generation, the word, in this matter of getting 
married, was so nearly as good as the bond, that a broken 
engagement was always a solemn, and generally a dis¬ 
graceful thing. So, when she said that Blair had 
“stolen David’s wife,” she cringed with shame. What 
'would his father say to such conduct I In what had she 
been w^anting that Herbert’s son could disgrace his 
father’s name—and hate his mother? For of course he 

241 


THE IRON WOMAN 

must hate her to shut her out of his life, and not tell her 
he was going to get married! Her mind seemed to 
oscillate between the abstraction of his dishonor and 
a more intimate and primitive pain,—the sense of per¬ 
sonal slight. “Oh, my son, my son, my son,” she 
said. She was bending over, her elbows on her knees, her 
furrowed forehead resting on her clenched hands; her 
whole big body quivered. He had shut her out. . . . 
He hated her. . . . He had never loved her. . . . “My 
son! my son!” Then a sharp return of memory to the 
shame of his conduct whipped her to her feet and set her 
walking about the room. It was long after midnight 
before she said to herself that the first thing, to do was 
to learn exactly what had happened. Nannie must tell 
her. It was then that she went up to her stepdaughter’s 
room. 

When Nannie had told her, or rather when Blair’s 
letter had made the thing shamefully clear, she went 
down-stairs and faced the situation. Who was re¬ 
sponsible for it? Who was to blame—^before she could 
add, in her mind, “Elizabeth or Blair?” some trick of 
memory finished her question: who was to blame —''this 
man or his parents?'' The suggestion of personal re¬ 
sponsibility was like a blow in the face. She flinched 
under it, and sat down abruptly, breathing hard. How 
could it be possible that she was to blame ? What had 
she left undone that other mothers did ? She had loved 
him; no mother could have loved him more than she 
did!—and he had never cared for her love. In what 
had she been lacking ? He had had a religious bringing 
up; she had begun to take him to church when he was 
four years old. He had had every educational oppor¬ 
tunity. All that he wanted he had had. She had never 
stinted him in anything. Could any mother have done 
more? Could Herbert himself have done more? No; 
she could not reproach herself for lack of love. She had 
loved him, so that she had spared him everything—even 
242 


THE IRON WOMAN 


desire! All that he could want was his before he could 
ask for it. 

In the midst of this angry justifying of herself, tramp¬ 
ing up and down the long room, she stopped suddenly 
and looked about her; where was her knitting? Her 
thoughts were in such a distracted tangle that the accus¬ 
tomed automatic movement of her fingers was impera¬ 
tive. She tucked the grimy pink ball of zephyr under 
her arm, and tightening her fingers on the bent and 
yellowing old needles, began again her fierce pacing up 
and down, up and down. But the room seemed to 
cramp her, and by and by she went across the hall into 
Nannie’s parlor, where the fire had sprung into cheerful 
flames; here she paused for a while, standing with one 
foot on the fender, knitting rapidly, her unseeing eyes 
fixed on the needles. Yes; Blair had had no cares, no 
responsibilities,—and as for money! With a wave of 
resentment, she thought that she would find out in the 
morning from her bookkeeper just how much money 
she had given him since he was twenty-one. It was then 
that a bleak consciousness, like the dull light of a winter 
dawn, slowly began to take possession of her: money. 
She had given him money; but what else had she given 
him? Not companionship; she had never had the time 
for that; besides, he would not have wanted it; she 
knew, inarticulately, that he and she had never spoken 
the same language. Not sympathy in his endless futili¬ 
ties; what intelligent person could sympathize with a 
man who found serious occupation in buying—^well, 
china beetles ? Or pictures! She glanced angrily over at 
that piece of blackened canvas by the door, its gold frame 
glimmering faintly in the firelight. He had spent five 
thousand dollars on a picture that you could cover with 
your two hands! Yes; she had given him money; 
but that was all she had given him. Money was ap¬ 
parently the only thing they had in common. 

Then came another surge of resentment,—that piti- 

24^ 


THE IRON WOMAN 

ful resentment of the wounded heart; Blair had never 
cared how hard she worked to make money for him! 
It occurred to her, perhaps for the first time in her 
life, that she worked very hard; she said to herself that 
sometimes she was tired. Yes, she had never thought of 
it before, but she was sometimes very tired. But what 
did Blair care for that ? What did he care how hard she 
worked ? Even as she said it, with that anger which is a 
confession of something deeper than anger, her mind re¬ 
torted that if he had never cared how hard she worked 
for their money, she had never cared how easily he spent 
it. She had been irritated by his way of spending it, and 
she had been contemptuous; but she had never really 
cared. So it appeared that they did not have even 
money in common. The earning had been all hers; the 
spending had been all his. If she had liked to buy gim- 
cracks, they would have had that in common, and per¬ 
haps he would have been fond of her? “But I never 
knew how to be a fool,” she thought, simply. Yes; she 
didn’t know how to spend, she only knew how to earn. 
Of course, if he had had to earn what he spent, they 
would have had work as a bond of sympathy. Work! 
Blair had never understood that work was the finest 
thing in the world. She wondered why he had not 
understood it, when she herself had worked so hard— 
worked, in fact, so that he might be beyond the need of 
working. As she said that, her fingers were suddenly 
rigid on her needles; it seemed as if her soul had felt 
a jolt of dismay; why didn’t her son understand the joy 
of work? Because she had spared him all necessity for 
it!—for the work she had given him to do was not real, 
and they both knew it. Spared him? Robbed him! 
''Wlto hath sinmd, this man or his parents?'* “This 
man,” her selfish, indolent, dishonorable son, or she her¬ 
self, whose hurry to possess the one thing she wanted, 
that finest thing in the world. Work!—had pushed him 
into the road of pleasant, shameful idleness, the road 
244 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that always leads to dishonor ? Good God! what a fool 
she had been not to make him work. 

Sarah Maitland, tramping back and forth, the ball of 
pink worsted dragging behind her in a grimy tangle, 
thought these things with a sledge-hammer directness 
that spared herself nothing. She wanted the truth, no 
matter how it made her cringe to find it! She would 
hammer out her very heart to find the truth. And 
the truth she found was that she had never allowed 
Blair to meet the negations of life—to meet those No's, 
which teach the eternal affirmations of character. He 
had had everything; he had done nothing. The result 
was as inevitable as the action of a law of nature! In 
the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she saw 
that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said 
to her once, “fullness of bread and abundance of idle¬ 
ness.” And nov7 she was learning what bread and idle¬ 
ness together must always make of a man. 

Walking up and down the dimly lighted room, she had 
a vision of her sin that made her groan. She had made 
Blair what he was: because it had been easy for her to 
make things easy for him, she had given him his heart’s 
desire, and brought leanness withal to his soul. In satisfy¬ 
ing her own hunger for work, she had forgotten to give it 
to him, and he had starved for it! She had left, by this 
time, far behind her the personal affront to her of his 
reserves; she took meekly the knowledge that he did not 
love her: she even thought of his marriage as unimpor¬ 
tant, or as important only because it was a symptom of a 
condition for which she was responsible. And having 
once realized and accepted this fact, there was only one 
solemn question in her mind; 

“What am I going to do about it?” 

For she believed, as other parents have believed before 
her—anc probably will go on believing as long as there 
are parents and sons—she believed that she could, in 
some way or other, by the very strength of her agonizing 

245 


THE IRON WOMAN 


love, force into her son’s soul from the outside that 
Kingdom of God which must be within. “Oh, what 
am I going to do?” she said to herself. 

She stood still and covered her face with her hands« 
“God,” she said, “don’t punish him! It’s my fault; 
punish me.’’ 

Perhaps she had never really prayed before. 


CHAPTER XX 


Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss 
White in the hall, listened with tense nerves for the 
wheels of the carriage that was to bring David Richie 
“to breakfast.“ 

“Send him in to me,” Mr. Ferguson had said; and 
then had shut himself into his library. 

Miss White was quivering with terror when at last she 
heard the carriage door bang. David came leaping up 
the steps, his face rosy as a girl’s in the raw morning 
air—it was a lowering Mercer morning, with the street 
lamps burning at eight o’clock in a murk of smoke and 
fog. He raked the windows with a smiling glance, and 
then stood, laughing for sheer happiness, waiting for her 
to open the door to him. 

David had had a change of spirit, if not of mind, since 
he wrote his eminently sensible letter to Elizabeth. He 
had been able to scrape up enough money of his own to 
pay at least one of his bills, and things had gone better 
with him at the hospital, so he no longer felt the unrea¬ 
sonable humiliation which Elizabeth’s proposal had 
accentuated in him. The reproach which his mood had 
read into her letter had vanished after a good night’s 
sleep and a good day’s work; now, it seemed to him 
only an exquisite expression of most lovely love, which 
brought the color into his face, and made his lips bum 
at the thought of her lips! Of course her idea of marry¬ 
ing on her little money was not to be thought of—he and 
Mr. Ferguson would laugh over it together; but what 
an angel she was to think of it! All that night, in the 
247 


THE IRON WOMAN 


journey over the mountains, he had lain in his berth 
and looked out at the stars, cursing himself joyously for 
a dumb fool who had had no words to tell her how he 
loved her for tiiat sweet, divinely foolish proposal, which 
was “not to be thought of”! “But when I see her, I'll 
make her understand; when I hold her in my arms—” 
he told himself, with all the passion of twenty-six years 
which had no easy outlet of speech. 

When Robert Ferguson’s door opened, his heart was 
on his lips. “Eliz—” he began, and stopped short. 
“Oh, Miss White. Good morning, Miss White!” And 
before poor Cherry-pie knew it, he had given her a great 
hug; “Where is Elizabeth? Not out of bed yet? Oh, 
the lazybones!” He was so eager that, until he was 
fairly in the hall, with the front door shut, and his over¬ 
coat almost off, he did not notice her silence. Then he 
gave her a startled look. “Miss White! is anything the 
matter? Is Elizabeth ill?” 

“No; oh, no,” she said breathlessly; “but—Mr. 
Ferguson will tell you. No, she is not sick. Go, he 
will tell you. In the Hbrary.” 

The color dropped out of his face as a flag drops to 
half-mast. “ She is dead,” he said, with absolute finality 
in his voice. “When did she die?” He stood staring 
straight ahead of him at the wall, ghastly with fright. 

“No! no! She is not dead; she is well. Quite well; 
oh, very well. Go, David, my dear boy—oh, my dear 
boy! Go to Mr. Ferguson. He will tell you. But it is 
—terrible, David.” 

He went, dazed, and saying, “Why, but what is it? 
If she is not—not—” 

Robert Ferguson met him on the threshold of the 
library, drew him in, closed the door, and looked him full 
in the face. “No, she isn’t dead,” he said; “I wish to 
God she were.” Then he struck him hard on the shoul¬ 
der. “David,” he said harshly, “be a man; they’ve 
played a damned dirty trick on you. Yesterday she 
248 


THE IRON WOMAN 


married Blair Maitland. . . . Take it like a man, and be 
thankful you are rid of her.” He wheeled about and 
stood with his back to his niece’s lover. He had guided 
the inevitable sword, but he could not witness the agony 
of the wound. There was complete stillness in the 
room; the ticking of the clock suddenly hammered in 
Robert Ferguson’s ears; a cinder fell softly from the 
grate. Then he heard a long-drawn breath: 

“Tell me, if you please, exactly what has happened.” 

Elizabeth’s uncle, still with his back turned, told him 
what little he knew. “I don’t know where they are,” 
he ended; “ I don’t want to know. The scoundrel wrote 
to Nannie, but he gave no address. Elizabeth’s letter 
to me is on my table; read it.” 

He heard David move over to the library table; he 
heard the rustle of the sheet of paper as it was drawn out 
of the envelope. Then silence again, and the clamor of 
the clock. He turned round, in time to see David stagger 
slightly and drop into a chair; perspiration had burst 
out on his forehead. He was so white around his lips 
that Robert Ferguson knew that for a moment his body 
shared the awful astonishment of his soul. “There’s 
some whiskey over there,” he said, nodding toward a 
side table. David shook his head. Then, still shudder¬ 
ing with that dreadful sickness, he spoke. 

“She . . . has married—Blair? he repeated, 

uncomprehendingly. He put his hand up to his head 
with that strange, cosmic gesture which horrified human¬ 
ity has made ever since it was capable of feeling horror. 

“Yes,” Mr. Ferguson said grimly; “yes, Blair—your 
friend! Well, you are not the first man who has had a 
sweetheart—and a * friend.’ A wife, even—and a ‘ friend.’ 
And then discovered that he had neither wife nor friend. 
Damn him.” 

“Damn him?” said David, and burst into a scream of 
laughter. He was on his feet now, but he rocked a little 
€11 his shaking legs. “Damnation is too good for him; 

249 


THE IRON WOMAN 


may God—” In the outburst of fury that followed, even 
Robert Ferguson quailed and put up a protesting hand. 

“David—David,” he stammered, actually recoiling 
before that storm of words. “David, he will get what 
he deserves. She was worthless!” 

David stopped short. At the mention of Elizabeth, 
his hurricane of rage dropped suddenly into the flat 
calm of absolute bewilderment. “Do not speak of 
Elizabeth in that way, in my presence,” he said, panting. 

“She is her mother’s daughter! She is bad, through 
and through. She—” 

“Stop!” David cried, violently; “what in hell do you 
keep on saying that for? I will not listen—I wdll not 
hear.” . . . He was beside himself; he did not know 
what he said. 

But Robert Ferguson was silenced. When David 
spoke again, it was in gasps, and his words came thickly 
as if his tongue were numb: “What—what are we to 
do?” 

“Do? There is nothing to do, that I can see.” 

“She must be taken away from him!” 

“Nobody knows where they are. But if I did know, 
I wouldn’t lift my hand to get her away. She has made 
her bed—she can lie in it, so far as I am concerned.” 

“But she didn’t!” David groaned; “you don’t under¬ 
stand. I am the one to curse, not Elizabeth.” 

“What are you talking about?’' 

“I did it.” 

The older man looked at him with almost contemptu¬ 
ous incredulity. “My dear fellow, what is the use of 
denying facts? You can’t make black white, can you? 
Day before yesterday you loved this—this,” he seemed 
to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said, 
almost meekly: “girl. Day before yesterday she ex¬ 
pected to marry you. To-day she is the wife of another 
man. Have you committed any crime in the last three 
days which justifies that ?” 

250 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Yes,” David said, in a smothered voice, “I have. ' 
Then he handed back to the shamed and angry man the 
poor, pitiful little letter. “Don’t you see.? She says, 
‘David didn’t want’”—he broke off, unable to speak. 
A moment later he added, “ ‘E. F.’ She isn’t used to the 
=—the other, yet,” he said, again with that bewildered 
look. 

But Elizabeth’s uncle was too absorbed in his own 
humiliation to see confession in that tragic initial. “ What 
is that nonsense about your not wanting her?” 

“ She thought so. She had reason to think so.” 

“You had better explain yourself, David.” 

“She wrote to me,” David said, after a pause; “she 
told me she would have that money of hers on her birth¬ 
day. She said we could be married then.” He red¬ 
dened to his temples. “She asked me to marry her 
that day; asked me, you understand.” He turned on 
his heel and went over to the window; he stood there for 
some minutes with his back to Robert Ferguson. The 
green door in the wall between the two gardens was 
swinging back and forth on sagging hinges; David 
watched it with unseeing eyes; suddenly a sooty pigeon 
came circling down and lit just inside the old arbor, 
which was choked with snow shovelled from the flag¬ 
stones of the path. Who can say why, watching the 
pigeon’s teetering walk on the soot-specked snow, David 
should smell the fragrance of heliotrope hot in the sun¬ 
shine, and see Elizabeth drawing Blair’s ring from her 
soft young bosom ? He turned back to her uncle, with 
a rigid face: “Well, /—I said—‘no’ to her letter. Do 
you understand? I told her ‘no.’ 'No,' to a girl like 

Elizabeth! Because, in my—my filthy pride—” he 
paused, picked up a book, turned it over and over, and 
then put it straight edge to edge with the table. His 
hand was trembling violently. When he could speak 
again ?t was in a whisper. “My cursed pride. I didn’t 
war-t to marry until I could do everything. I wasn’t 

251 


THE IRON WOMAN 


willing to be under obligations; I told her so. I said— 
‘no/ It made her angry. It would make any girl 
angry,—but Elizabeth! Why, she used to bite herself 
when she w^as angry. When she is angry, she will do 
—anything. She has done it. My God!’' 

Robert Ferguson could not look at him. He made a 
pretense of taking up some papers from his desk, and 
somehow or other got himself out of the room. He 
found Miss White in the hall, clasping and unclasping 
her little thin old hands. 

“How did he—?” she tried to say, but her poor nib¬ 
bling lip could not finish the question. 

“How does a man usually take a stab in the back?" 
he flung at her. “Don’t be a—" He stopped short. 
“I beg your pardon. Miss White." But she was too 
heartbroken to resent the rudeness of his suffering. 

After that they stood there waiting, without speaking 
to each other. Once Mr. Ferguson made as if he would 
go back to the library, but stopped with his hand on the 
door-knob; once Miss White said brokenly, “ The boy must 
have some breakfast"; but still they left him to himself. 

After a while. Cherry-pie sat down on the stairs and 
cried softly. Robert Ferguson walked about; now out 
to the front door, with a feint of looking at the ther¬ 
mometer in the vestibule; now the length of the hall, 
into which the fog had crept until the gas burned in a 
hazy ring; now into the parlor—from which he instantly 
fled as if a serpent had stung him: her little basket of 
embroidery, overflowing with its pretty foolishness, 
stood on the table. 

When David Richie opened the library door and came 
into the hall he was outwardly far steadier than they. 
“I think I’ll go to the depot now, sir. No, thank you. 
Miss White; I’ll get something to eat there," 

“Oh, but my dear boy," she said, trying to swallow 
her tears, “now do—now don’t—I can have your break- 
feest ready immejetly, and—" 

2S2 


IHE IRON WOMAN 


‘"Let him alone,” Mr. Ferguson '^aid; “he’ll eat when 
he feels like it. David, must you go back this morning ? 
I wish you’d stay.” 

“I have to go back, thank you, sir.” 

“You may find a letter from her at home; she didn’t 
know you were to be here to-day.” 

“I may,” David said; and some dull note in his voice 
told Robert Ferguson that the young man’s youth was 
over. 

“My boy,” he said, “forget her! You are well rid 
of—” he stopped short, with an apprehensive glance; 
but David made no protest; apparently he was not 
listening. 

“I shall take the express,” he said; “I must see my 
mother, before I go to the hospital to-night. She must 
be told. She will be—sorry.” 

“Your mother!” said Robert Ferguson. “Well, 
David, thank God you have loved one woman who is 
good!’* 

“I have loved two women who are good,” David said. 
He turned and took Miss White’s poor old, shaking hands 
in his.. “When she comes back—” 

“Comes back?” the older man cried out, furiously; 
“she shall never come back to this house!” 

David did not notice him: “Miss White, listen. When 
you see her, tell her I understand. Just tell her, ‘David 
says, “ I understand. ”' And Miss White, say: ‘He says, 
try to forgive him.’” 

She sobbed so, that instinctively, but without tender¬ 
ness, he put his arm about her; his face was dull to the 
point of indifference. “Don’t cry. Miss White. And 
be good to her; but I know you will be good to her!” 
He picked up his hat, put his coat over his arm, and 
stretched out his hand to Robert P'erguson with a steady 
smile. “Good-by, sir.” Then the smile dropped and 
left the amazed and naked face quivering before their 
eyes. Through the wave of merciful numbness which 
253 


THE IRON WOMAN 


had given him his hard composure, agony stabbed him. 
“For God’s sake, don’t be hard on her. She has enough 
to bear! And blame me— me, I did it—” 

He turned and fled out of the house, and the two 
unhappy people who loved Elizabeth looked at each 
other speechlessly. 


CHAPTER XXI 


Except in his gust of primitive fury when he first 
knew that he had been robbed, and in that last breaking 
down in the hall, David knew what had happened to 
him only, if one may say so, with the outside of his mind. 
Even while he was talking with comparative calmness to 
Mr. Ferguson, his thoughts were whirling, and veering, 
in dizzying circles—^bewildered rage, pity, fright, revolt, 
—and then back again to half-dazed fury. But each 
time he tried to realize exactly what had happened, 
something in him seemed to swerve, like a shying horse; 
he could not get near enough to the fact, to understand it. 
In a numb way he must have recognized this, because in 
those moments by himself in the library he deliberately 
shut a door upon the blasting truth. Later, of course, he 
would have to open it and look in upon the ruin of his 
life. Somewhere back in his thoughts he was aware 
that this moment of opening the Door would come, and 
come soon. But while he talked to Robert Ferguson, 
and tried, dully, to comfort Miss White, and even as he 
went down the steps up which he had bounded not an 
hour before, he was holding that moment off. His one 
clear feeling was a desire to be by himself. Then, he 
promised himself, when he was alone, he would open the 
Door, and face the Thing that lay behind it. But as he 
walked along the street, the Door was closed, bolted, 
locked, and his back was against it. 

“Elizabeth has married Blair,” he said to himself, 
softly. The words seemed to have no meaning. “Eliza¬ 
beth has married Blair,” he insisted again; but was only 

17 2,S5 


THE IRON WOMAN 


cognizant that the blur of fog around a street-lamp 
showed rainbow lines in a wonderful pattern. “They are 
all at right angles,” he said; “that’s interesting,” and 
looked ahead to see if the next light repeated the phe¬ 
nomenon. Then automatically he took out his watch: 
“Nine-thirty. Elizabeth has married Blair. The train 
leaves at ten. I had better be going to the depot. 
Elizabeth has married Blair” And he walked on, look¬ 
ing at the lamps burning in the fog. Then suddenly, as 
if the closed Door showed a crack of light, he decided that 
he would not go back on the express; an inarticulate 
impulse pierced him to the quick,—the impulse to 
resist, to fight, to save himself and her! But almost 
with the rending pang, the Door slammed to again and 
the impulse blurred—like the street-lamps. Still, the 
impetus of it was sufficient to keep him from turning 
toward the railroad station. 

“Hello!” some one said; Harry Knight was standing, 
grinning, directly in front of him; “you needn’t run 
down a friend of your youth, even if you don’t conde¬ 
scend to live in Mercer any more!” 

“Oh, hello,” David heard himself say. 

“When did you come to town? I’d ask you to lunch 
with me, but I suppose your lady-love would object. 
Wait till you get to be an old married man like me; then 
she’ll be glad to get rid of you!” 

David knew that he gave the expected laugh, and 
that he said it was a foggy day, and Philadelphia had 
a better climate than Mercer; (“he hasn’t heard it yet,” 
he was saying to himself) “yes, dark old hole; I’m going 
back to-night. Yes; awfully sorry I can’t—good-by—• 
good-by. (He’ll know by to-night.”) He did not notice 
when Knight seemed to melt into the mist; nor was he 
conscious that he had begun to walk again—on, and 
on, and on. Suddenly he paused before the entrance 
of a saloon, which bore, above “XXX Pale Ale,” in 
«ilt letters on the window, the sign “Landis’ Hotel.” 

256 


THE IRON WOMAN 


He was aware of overpowering fatigue. Why not go in 
here and sit down ? He would not meet any one he knew 
in such a place. “ Better take a room for an hour or two,” 
he thought. He knew that he must be alone to open 
that Door, but he did not say so; instead his mind, 
repeating, parrot-like, “Elizabeth has married Blair,” 
made its arrangements for privacy, as steadily as a sur¬ 
geon might make arrangements for a mortal opera¬ 
tion. 

As he entered the hotel, a woman on her hands and 
knees, slopping a wet cloth over the black and white 
marble floor of the office, looked up at him, and moved 
her bucket of dirty water to let him pass. “ Huh! He’s 
got a head on him this morning,” she thought knowingly. 
But the clerk at the desk gave him an uneasy glance. 
Men with tragic faces and bewildered eyes are not wel¬ 
comed by hotel clerks. 

“Say,” he said, pleasantly enough, as he handed out a 
key, “don’t you want a pick-me-up? You’re kind o’ 
white round the gills.” 

David nodded. “Where’s the bar?” he said thickly. 
He found his way to it, and while he waited for his whis¬ 
ky he lifted a corkscrew from the counter and looked at 
it closelyc “That’s something new, isn’t it?” he said to 
the man who was rinsing out a glass for him; “I never 
saw a corkscrew (Elizabeth has married Blair) with that 
hook thing on the side.” He took his two fingers of 
whisky, and followed the bell-boy to a room. 

“I don’t like that young feller’s looks,” the clerk told 
the scrub-woman; “we don’t want any more free read¬ 
ing notices in the papers of this hotel being a roadhouse 
on the way to heaven.” And when the bell-boy who 
had shown the unwelcome guest to his room came back 
to his bench in the office, he interrogated him, with a 
grin that was not altogether facetious: “Any revolvers 
lyin’ round up in No, 20 , or any of those knobby blue 
bottles?” 


257 


THE IRON WOMAN 


*‘Naw,*' said the bell-boy, disgustedly, “ner no dimes, 
neither/' 

David, in the small, unfriendly hotel bedroom that 
looked out upon squalid back yards and smelled as if its 
one window had not been opened for a year, was at last 
alone. Down in the alley, a hand-organ was shrilling 
monotonously: Kafoozleum—Kafoozleum. 

He looked about him for a minute, then tried to open 
the window, but the sash stuck; he shook it violently, 
then shoved it up with such force that a cracked pane of 
glass clattered out; a gust of raw air came into the 
stagnant mustiness of the narrow room. After that he 
sat down and drew a long breath. Then he opened the 
Door. . . . 

Down-stairs the clerk was sharing his uneasiness with 
tbe barkeeper. “He came in looking like death. Wild¬ 
eyed he was. Mrs. Maloney there will tell you. She 
came up to me and remarked on it. No, sir, men like 
that ain’t healthy for this hotel.” 

“That’s so,” the barkeeper agreed. “Why didn’t 
you tell him you were full up?” 

“Well, he seemed the gentleman,” the clerk said. 
“I didn’t just see my way—” 

“Huh!” the other flung back at him resentfully. 
“ ’Tain’t only a poor man that puts his hand in the till, 
and then hires a room in a hotel”—he made a significant 
gesture and rolled up his eyes. 

“He didn’t register,” the clerk said. “Only wanted 
the room for a couple of hours.” 

“A couple of hours is long enough to—” said the bar¬ 
keeper. 

“ Good idea to send a boy up to ask if he rung?” 

“/’d have sent him ten minutes ago,” the barkeeper 
said scornfully. 

So it was that David, staring in at his ruin, was inter¬ 
rupted more than once that morning: “ No, I didn’t ring. 
Clear out.” And again: “No; I’m not waiting for any» 
2s8 


THE IRON WOMAN 


bod/o Shut that door.” But the third time he was 
frantic: “Damn it, if you knock on my door again I’ll 
kick you down-stairs! Do you understand?” And at 
that the office subsided. 

“They don’t do it when they’re swearing mad,” the 
barkeeper said. “I guess his girl has given him the 
mitten. You ladies are always making trouble for us, 
Mrs. Maloney. You drive us to suicide for love of you!” 
Mrs. M'a.loney simperingly admitted her baleful influence. 
“As for you,” he jeered at the clerk, “you’re fresh, I 
guess. That little affair in i8 got on your nerves.” 

“Well, if you’d found him as I did, I guess it would ’a’ 
got on your nerves,” the clerk said, affrontedly; he added 
under his breath that they could kill themselves all over 
the house, and he wouldn’t lift a finger to stop ’em. 
“You don’t get no thanks,” he told himself gloomily. 
But after that, No. 20 was not disturbed. 

At first, when David opened his closed Door and 
looked in, there had been the shock again. He was 
stunned with incredulous astonishment. Then his 
mind cleared. With the clearing came once more that 
organic anger of the robbed man; an anger that has in 
it the uncontrollable impulse to regain his property. It 
could not be—^this thing that had happened. It should 
not be! 

He would see her; he would take her. As for him — 
David’s sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into 
the living flesh of a man’s neck. He knew the lust of 
murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he exulted, 
the baseness of what Blair had done was so astound¬ 
ing, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his hands 
clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of 
him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal 
amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For 
one instant the unbelievableness of Blair’s dishonor 
threw him back into that clamoring confusion from 
which he had escaped since he opened the Door. Blair 

259 


THE IRON WOMAN 


must have been in love with her! Had Elizabeth sus¬ 
pected it? She certainly had never hinted it to him; 
why not? Some girlish delicacy? But Blair— Blair, 
a dishonorable man? In the confounding turmoil of 
this uprooting of old admirations, he was conscious of the 
hand-organ down in the alley, pounding out its imbecile 
refrain. He even found himself repeating the meaning¬ 
less words: 

“ In ancient days there lived a Turk, 

A horrid beast within the East, 

Oh, Kafoozleum, Kafoozleum”— 

His mind righted itself; he came back to facts, and to 
the simple incisive question: what must he do ? It was 
not until the afternoon that, by one tortuous and tortur¬ 
ing line of reasoning after another, he came to know that, 
as her uncle had said, for the present he could do nothing. 

“Nothing?” At first, David had laughed savagely; 
he would turn the world upside down before he would 
leave her in her misery! For that she was in misery he 
never doubted; nor did he stop to ask himself whether 
she had repented her madness, he only groaned. He 
saw, or thought he saw, the whole thing. There was not 
one doubt, not one poisonous suspicion of Elizabeth 
herself. That she was disloyal to him never entered his 
head. To David she was only in a terrible trap, from 
which, at any cost, she must be rescued. That her own 
mad temper had brought her to such a pass was neither 
here nor there; it had nothing to do with the matter in 
hand, namely her rescue—and then the killing of the 
man who had trapped her! It came into David’s 
head—^like a lamp moving toward him through a mist 
—^that perhaps she had written to him? He had not 
really grasped the idea when Robert Ferguson suggested 
it; but now he was suddenly certain that a letter must 
be awaiting him in Philadelphia! Perhaps in it she 
260 


THE IRON WOMAN 


called on him to come and help her ? The thought was 
like a whip. He forgot his desire to kill Blair; he leaped 
to his feet, fumbling in his pocket for a time-table; then 
realized that there was no train across the mountains 
until night. Should he telegraph his mother to open 
any letter from Elizabeth, and wire him where she was ? 
No; even in the whirl of his perplexity, he knew he could 
not let any other eyes than his own see what, in her 
abasement, Elizabeth must have written. He began to 
pace frantically up and down; then stood and looked 
out of the window, beating his mind back to calmness,— 
for he must be calm. He must think what could be 
done. He would get the letter as soon as he reached 
home; until he got it and learned where she was, the 
only thing to do was to decide how she should be saved. 

And so it was that, not allowing himself to dip down 
into that elemental rage of the wronged man, not even 
daring to think of his own incredible blunder which had 
kindled her crazy anger, still less venturing to let his 
thought rest on the suffering that had come to her, he 
kept his mind steadily on that one imperative question: 
what was to he done? At first the situation seemed almost 
simple: she must leave Blair instantly. “To-day!” he 
said to himself, striking the rickety table before him with 
his fist; “to-day!” Next, the marriage must be an¬ 
nulled. That was all; annulled! These were the 
premises from which he started. All that long, dark 
morning, well into the afternoon, he followed blind al¬ 
leys of thought, ending always in the same impasse — 
there was nothing he could do. He did not even know 
where she was, until the letter in Philadelphia should 
tell him,—at that thought he looked at his watch again. 
Oh, how many endless hours before he could go and get 
that letter! And after all, she was Blair Maitland’s 
wife. Suppose she did leave him, would the swine give 
her her freedom ? Not without long, involved processes 
of law; he knew his man well enough to know that. 

261 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Yes, there would have to be dreadful publicity, heart 
breaking humiliation for his poor, mad darling. She 
would have to face those things. Oh, if he only knew 
where she was, so that he could go that moment and 
help her to take that first step of flight. She must go 
at once to his mother. Yes, his mother would shelter 
her from the beast. If he could only get word to her, 
to go, instantly, to his mother. But he did not know 
where she was! He cursed himself for not having taken 
the ten o’clock express! He could have been at home 
that night, had her letter, and started out again to go to 
her. As it was, nothing could be done until to-morrow 
morning. Then he would know what to do, because 
then he would know where she was. But meantime— 
meantime . . . 

There is no doubt that when the frantic man realized 
his befogging ignorance, and found himself involved in 
this dreadful delay, the hotel clerk’s apprehensions were, 
at least for wild moments, justified. But only for mo¬ 
ments—Elizabeth was to be rescued! David could not 
consider escape from his own misery until that task had 
been accomplished. Yet consider: his girl, his woman— 
another man’s; and he helpless! And suppose he did 
rescue her; suppose he did drag her from the arms of the 
thief who had been his friend—could it ever be the same ? 
Never. Never. Never. His Elizabeth was dead. The 
woman whom he meant to have yet—somehow, some¬ 
time, somewhere; the woman whom Blair Maitland had 
filched from him, was not his Elizabeth. The rose, 
trampled in the mire, may be lifted, it may be revived, it 
may be fragrant—but it has known the mire! 

There were, in the early darkening afternoon, crazy 
moments for David Richie. Moments of murderous 
hate of Blair, moments of unbearable consciousness of 
his own responsibility, moments of almost repulsion for 
the tragic, marred creature he loved; and at this last 
appalling revelation to himself of his own possibilities^ 
262 


THE IRON WOMAN 


moments of absolute despair. And when one of thosd 
despairing moments came, he put his head down on the 
table, on his folded arms, and cried for his mother. He 
cried hard, like a child: “Matema!"’ 

And so it was that he arose and went to his mother. 


CHAPTER XXII 


When, after his interview with David, Robert Fer¬ 
guson went into Mrs. Maitland’s office at the Works, he 
looked older by twenty years than when he had left it 
the night before. Sarah Maitland, sitting at her desk, 
heard his step, and wheeled round to greet .him. 

“Better shut that door,” she said briefly; and he gave 
the door in the glass partition a shove with his foot. 
Then they looked at each other. “Well,” she said; 
and stretched out her hand. “We’re in the same box. 
I guess we’d better shake hands.” She grinned with 
pain, but she forced her grunt of a laugh. “ What’s 
your story? Mine is only his explanation to Nannie.” 

“Mine isn’t even that. She merely wrote me she had 
married him; that was all. Miss White told me what he 
wrote to Nannie. What do you know about it?” 

“That’s all I know,” she said, and gave him Blair’s 
note. 

He read it, and handed it back in silence. 

“Well, what are you going to do?” she asked. 

“Do ? There’s nothing to do. I’m done with her!” 

“He’s my son,” Sarah Maitland said. “I have got to 
do something.” 

“But there’s nothing to be done,” he pointed out; 
it was not like this ruthless woman to waste time crying 
over spilt milk. “They are both of age, and they are 
married; that’s all there is to it. I went into the mayor’s 
office and found the registry. The marriage is all right 
so far as that goes. As for David—men don’t go out 
with a gun or a horsewhip in these fine times. He won’^ 

264 


THE IRON WOMAN 


do anything. For that matter, he is well rid of her. 1 
told him so. I might have added that the best thing a 
jilted man can do is to go down on his knees and thank 
God that he’s been jilted; I know what I’m talking 
about! As for your son—” he stopped. 

“Yes,” she said, “my son?’' And even in his fury, 
Robert Ferguson felt a pang at the sight of her tom and 
ravaged face that quivered so that he turned his eyes 
away out of sheer decency. “I must do something for 
my son. And I think I know what it will be.” She bit 
her forefinger, frowning with thought. “I think I 
know ... I have not done right by Blair.” 

“No, you haven’t,” he said dryly. “Have you just 
discovered that? But I don’t see what you or I or 
God Almighty can do now! They’re married.” 

“Oh, I can’t do anything about this marriage,” she 
said, with a gesture of indifference; “but that’s not the 
important thing.” 

“Not important? What do you mean?” 

“I mean that the important thing is to know what 
made Blair behave in this way; and then cure him.” 

“Cure him! There’s no cure for rottenness.” He 
was so beside himself with pain that he forgot that'she 
was a vroman, and Blair’s mother. 

“I blame myself for Blair’s conduct,” she said. 

“Oh, Elizabeth is as bad as he is!” But he waited 
for her contradiction. 

It did not come. “Probably worse.” Involuntarily 
he raised a protesting hand. 

“But I mean to forgive her,” said Sarah Maitland, 
mth cold determination. 

“Forgive Elizabeth?” he said, angrily, and his anger 
was the very small end of the wedge of his own forgive¬ 
ness; “forgive her? It strikes me the boot is on the 
other leg, Mrs. Maitland.” 

“Oh, well,” she said, “what difference does it make? 
I guess it’s a case of the pot and the kettle. I’m not 
265 


THE IRON WOMAN 


blaming your girl overmuch; although a bad woman isi 
always worse than a bad man. In this case, Elizabeth 
acted from hate, and Blair from love; the result is the 
same, of course, but one motive is worse than the other. 
But never mind that—Blair has got her, and he will be 
faithful to her; for a while, anyhow. And Elizabeth will 
get used to him—that’s Nature, and Nature is bigger 
than a girl’s first fancy. So if David doesn’t interfere— 
you think he won’t? you don’t know human nature, 
Friend Ferguson! David isn’t a saint—at least I hope he 
isn’t; I don’t care much about twenty-seven-year-old 
male saints. David may not be able to interfere, but 
he’ll try to, somehow. You wait! As for Blair, as I 
say, if David doesn’t put his finger in the pie, Blair isn’t 
hopeless.” 

“I’m glad you think so.” 

“I do think so. Blair is young yet; and if she costs 
him something, he may value her—and I think I can 
manage to make her cost him something! A man doesn’t 
value what comes cheap; and all his life everything has 
come cheap to Blair.” 

” I don’t see what you’re driving at.” 

‘‘Just this,” she explained; “Blair has had everything 
he wanted,—oh, yes, yes; it’s my fault!” she struck an 
impatient fist upon the arm of her chair. “ I told you it 
was my fault. Don’t take precious time to argue over 
that. It is a//my fault. There! will that satisfy you? 
I’ve given him everything. So he thought he could have 
everything. He doesn’t know the meaning of ‘no.’ 
He has got to learn. I shall teach him. I have thought 
it all out. I’m going to make a man of him.” 

‘‘How?” said Robert Ferguson. 

“I haven’t got the details clear in my mind yet. but 
this is the gist of it: No money hut what he earns'' 

‘‘No money?” 

“After this, it will be ‘root, hog, or die.’” 

“But Blair can’t root,” her superintendent said, fair in 
266 


THE IRON WOMAN 


spite of himself. And at that her face lighted with a 
sort of awful purpose. 

“Then he must die! Ferguson, don’t you see —he has 
begun to die already?” Again her face quivered. “ Look 
at this business of taking David’s wife—oh, I know, they 
weren’t married yet, but the principle is the same; 
w'hat do you call that but dying? Look at his whole 
life: what has he done? Received—received! Given 
nothing. Ferguson, you can’t fool God: you’ve got to 
give something! A privilege means an obligation—the 
obligation of sweat! Sweat of your body or your 
brains. Blair has never sweated. He’s always had 
something for nothing. That is the one immorality 
that damns. It has damned Blair. Of course, I ought 
to have realized it before, but I—I suppose I was too 
busy. Yes; I tell you, if Blair had had to work for 
what he’s got, as you and I have worked for what 
we’ve got, he wouldn’t be where he is to-day. You 
know that! He’d have had something else to think of 
than satisfying his eyes, or his stomach, or his lust. 
He’d have been decent.” 

“He might have been,” Robert Ferguson said drearily, 
“but I doubt it. Anyway, you can’t, by making him 
earn or go without, or anything else, give David’s girl 
back to him.” 

“No,” she said heavily, and for a moment her passion 
of hope flagged; “no, I can’t do that. But I shall try 
to make it up to David in some way, of course. Where 
is he?” she broke off. 

'’’le told her briefly of David’s arrival and departure. 
“He’s gone back to his mother,” he ended; “she’ll com¬ 
fort him.” Then, with a bark of anger, he added, “Mrs, 
R ichie v/as always saying that Elizabeth would turn out 
well. I wonder what she will say now? I knew better; 
her mother, my brother Arthur’s wife, was—no good. 
Yet I let Mrs. Richie bamboozle me into building on her. 
I always said Life shouldn’t play the same trick on me 
267 


THE IRON WOMAN 


twice—^but it has done it! It has done it. My heart 
was set on Elizabeth. Yes, Mrs. Maitland, I’ve been 
fooled again—but so have you.” 

“Nothing of the kind! I never was fooled before,’* 
Sarah Maitland said; “and I sha’n’t be again. I am 
going to make a man of my son! As for your girl, 
forgive her, Ferguson. Don’t be a fool; you take it out 
of yourself when you refuse forgiveness.” 

“I’ll never forgive her,” said Robert Ferguson; “she’s 
hurt the woman I—I have a regard for; she’s made 
David’s mother suffer. I’m done with her!” 


CHAPTER XXIII 


When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there 
came to Elizabeth the ruthless to-morrow of her act, her 
first clear thought was to kill herself. . . . 

After the marriage in the mayor’s office—^where they 
paused long enough to write the two notes that were 
received the next day—Blair had fled with her up into 
the mountains to a little hotel, where they would not, he 
felt certain, encounter any acquaintances. 

Elizabeth neither assented nor objected. From the 
moment she had struck her hand into his, there in the 
tawdry “saloon” of the toll-house, and cried out, 
''ComeV she let him do as he chose. So he had carried 
her away to the city hall, where, like any other unclassed 
or unchurched lovers, they were married by a hurried 
city official. She had had one more crisis of rage, when 
in the mayor’s office, as she stood at a high wall desk and 
wrote with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her 
uncle, she said to herself that, as to David Richie, he 
could hear the news from her uncle—or never hear it; 
she didn’t care which. Then for an instant her eyes 
glittered again; but except for that one moment, she 
seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent 
acquiescences had been signs that he had won something 
more than her consent to revenge herself upon David,— 
and he wanted more! In all his life he had never deeply 
cared for anybody but himself; but now, under the 
terrible selfishness of his act, under the primitive in¬ 
stinct that he called love, there was, trembling in the 
depths of his nature. Love. It had been bom only a 
260 


THE IRON WOMAN 


little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It had 
had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent 
god of his, it had not been strong enough to save him 
from himself, or save Elizabeth from him. But be did 
love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for he was 
tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was 
inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in 
her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most 
unbending steel—wby not from this yielding, silent 
thing, Elizabeth’s heart? But numb and flaccid, per¬ 
fectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she 
no more responded to him than down would have re¬ 
sponded to the blow of flint. . . . 

It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, 
going down-stairs very early in the morning, stopped in 
the office of the hotel to write a brief but intensely polite 
note to his mother, telling her of his marriage. “ Nannie 
will have broken it to her—poor, dear old Nannie!” he 
said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, 
“but of course it’s proper to announce it myself.” Then 
he dropped the “announcement” into the post-bag, and 
went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive 
morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the 
air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving the road 
and pushing aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he 
found himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down 
on a fallen tree trunk to think. . , . The moment had 
come when the only god he knew would no longer be 
denied. 

“I might as well face it,” he said; and slowly lit a 
cigar. But instead of “facing it,” he began to watch 
the first sparse and fitful beginnings of snow—hesitant 
flakes that sauntered down to rest for a crystal moment 
on his coat sleeve. vSuddenly he caught his thoughts to¬ 
gether with a jerk: “I’ve got to think it out!” he said. 
Curiously enough, when he said this his thought did not 
turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie. 

270 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Instead, in the next hou** of reasonings and excuses, 
there was always, back in his mind, one face—scornful, 
contemptuous even; a face he had known only as gentle, 
and sometimes tender; the face of David’s mother. 
Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his 
mind. “What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken 
her engagement with him. I had the right to speak 
before the thing was smoothed over again. Any¬ 
body would say so, even—even Mrs. Richie if she could 
really understand how things were. But of course she 
will only see his side.” All his excuses for his conduct 
were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of 
Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had 
wronged her. He loved her so crazily that he could not 
realize his cruelty. 

It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint 
patter of small, hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over 
his head. Suddenly some bleached and withered ferns 
in front of him rustled, and he saw wise, bright eyes 
looking at him. “ I wish I had some nuts for you, bun¬ 
ny,” he said—and the bright eyes vanished with a furry 
whirl through the ferns. He picked up the empty half 
of a hickory-nut, and turning it over in his fingers, looked 
at the white grooves left by small sharp teeth. “You 
little beggars must get pretty hungry in the winter, bun¬ 
ny,” he said; “I’ll bring a bag of nuts out here for you 
some day.” But while he was talking to the squirrel, he 
was wrestling with his god. It was characteristic oi him 
that never once in that struggle to justify i imself did he 
use the excuse of Elizabeth’s consent. His code, which 
had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit 
him to blame her—even if she deserved it. Instead, 
over and over he heaped up his own poor defense: “If I 
had waited, he might have patched it up with her.” 
Over and over the defense crumbled before his eyes: 
“it was contemptible not to give him the chance to 
patch it up.” Then would come his angry retort' 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“That’s nonsense! Besides it is better, infinitely bet¬ 
ter, for her to marry me than a poor man like him. 
I can give her everything,—and love her! God, how I 
love her. Apart from any selfish consideration, it is a 
thousand times better for her.” For an instant his 
marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that his 
god laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his 
hypocrisy was the “touch on the hollow of the thigh; and 
the hollow of the thigh was out of joint”! He pitched 
the nut away with a vicious fling, and knew, inarticu¬ 
lately, that there was no use lying to himself any longer. 

With blank eyes he watched the snow piling up on a 
withered stalk of goldenrod. “ I wish it hadn’t happened 
in just the way it did,” he conceded;—his god was be¬ 
ginning to prevail!—“but if I had waited, I might have 
lost her.” Then a thought stabbed him: suppose 
that he should lose her anyhow ? Suppose that when 
she came to herself — the phrase was a confession! 
suppose she should want to leave him? It was an 
intolerable idea. “Well, she can’t,” he told himself, 
grimly, “she can’t, now.” His face was dusky with 
shame, yet when he said that, his lip loosened in a 
furtively exultant smile. Blair would have been less, or 
more, than a man if, at that moment, in spite of his 
shame, he had not exulted. “She’s my wife!” he said, 
through those shamed and smiling lips. Then his eyej* 
narrowed: “And she doesn’t care a damn for me.” 

So it was that as he sat there in the snow, watching 
the puff of white deepen on the stalk of goldenrod, his 
god prevailed yet a little more, for, so far as Elizabeth 
was concerned, he did not try to fool himself: “she 
doesn’t care a damn.” But when he said that, he saw 
the task of his life before him—to make her care! It was 
like the touch of a spur; he leaped to his feet, and flung 
up his arms in a sort of challenge. Yes; he had “ done 
the t! ing a man can’t do.” Yes; he ought not to have 
taken advantage of her anger. Yes; his honor was 

7 ^ 9 , 


THE IRON WOMAN 


smirched—grant it all! grant it all! “I was mad," he 
said, stung by this intolerable self-knowledge; “I was a 
cur. I ought to have waited; I know it. I admit it. 
But what’s the use of talking about it now? It’s done; 
and by God, she shall love me yet!’’ 

So it was that his god blessed him, as the best that is in 
us, always blesses us when it conquers us: the blessing 
was the revelation of his own dishonor. It is a divine 
moment, this of the consciousness of having been faith¬ 
less to one’s own ideals. And Blair Maitland, a false 
friend, a selfish and cruel lover, was not entirely con¬ 
temptible, for his eyes, beautiful and evasive, confessed 
the shock of a heavenly vision. 

As he walked home, he laid his plans very carefully: 
he must show her the most delicate consideration; he 
must avoid every possible annoyance; he must do this, 
he must not do that. “And I’ll buy her a pearl neck¬ 
lace,’’ he told himself, too absorbed in the gravity of the 
situation to see in such an impulse the assertion that he 
was indeed his mother’s son! But the foundation of all 
his plans for making Elizabeth content, was the deter¬ 
mination not to admit for a single instant, to anybody 
but himself, that he had done anything to be ashamed 
of. Which showed that his god was not yet God. 

When he got back to the hotel, he found that Elizabeth 
had not left her room; and rushing up-stairs two steps 
at a time, he knocked at her door. . . . She was sitting 
on the edge of her bed, her lips parted, her eyes staring 
blindly out of the window at the snow. The flakes were 
so thick now that the meadow on the other side of the 
road and the mountain beyond were blurred and almost 
blotted out; there was a gray pallor on her face as if the 
shadow of the storm had fallen on it. Instantly Blair 
knew that she “had come to herself." As he stood 
looking at her, something tightened in his throat; he 
broke out into the very last thing he had meant to say: 
‘ ‘ Elizabeth—forgive me!" 

27.^ 


FHE IRON WOMAN 


“I ought to die, you know,” she said, without turning 
her eyes from the window and the falling snow. 

He came and knelt down beside her, and kissed her 
hand. “Elizabeth, dearest! When I love you so?” 

He kissed her shoulder. She shivered. 

“My darling,” he said, passionately. 

She looked at him dully; “ I wish you would go away.” 

“Elizabeth, let me tell you how I love you.” 

“Love me?” she said; ''me?” 

“Elizabeth!” he protested; “you are an angel, and 
I love you—^no man ever loved a woman as I love 
you.” 

In her abasement she never thought of reproaching 
him, of saying “if you loved me, why did you betray 
me?” She had not gone as far as that yet. Her fall 
had been so tremendous that if she had any feeling about 
him, it was nothing more than the consciousness that he 
too, had gone over the precipice. “ Please go away,” she 
said. 

“Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If—if I hurried 
you too much, you will forgive me because I loved you 
so ? I didn’t dare to wait, for fear—” he stumbled on the 
confession which his god had wrung from him, but which 
must not be made to her. Elizabeth’s heavy eyes were 
suddenly keen. 

“Fear of what?” 

» “ Oh, don’t look at me that way! I love you so that it 
kills me to have you angry at me!” 

“ I am not angry with you,” she said, faintly surprised; 
“why should I be angry with you? Only, you see, Blair, 
I—I can’t live. I simply can’t live.” 

“You have got to live!—or I’ll die,” he said. “I 
love you, I tell you I love you!” His outstretched, 
trembling hands entreated hers, but she would not yield 
them to his touch; her shrinking movement away from 
him, her hands gripped together at her throat, filled him 
with absolute terror: “Elizabeth! don't — 

274 


THE IRON WOMAN 


She glanced at him with stony eyes. Blair was suffer^ 
ing. Why should he suffer? But his suffering did not 
interest her. “ Please go away,” she said, heavily. 

He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going 
miserably down-stairs to make a pretense of eating some 
breakfast. But all the while he was arranging entreaties 
and arguments in his own mind. He went to the door 
of their room a dozen times that morning, but it was 
locked. No, she did not want any breakfast. Wouldn’t 
she come out and walk? No, no, no. Please let her 
alone. And then in the afternoon; “Elizabeth, I must 
come in! You must have some food.” 

She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the 
food and to the fact that by this time there was, of 
course, a giggling consciousness in the hotel that the 
“bride and groom had had a rumpus.” . . . “A nice be¬ 
ginning for a honeymoon,” said the chambermaid, “lock¬ 
ing that pretty young man out of her room!—and me 
with my work to do in there. Well, I’m sorry for him; 
I bet you she’s a case.” 

Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in 
his position; the moment was too critical for such self- 
consciousness. When at last he took a little tray of 
food to his wife, and knelt beside her, begging her to eat, 
he was appalled at the ruin in her face. She drank some 
tea to please him; then she said, pitifully: 

“What shall we do, Blair?” That she should say 
“we” showed that these hours which had plowed her 
face had also sowed some seed of unselfishness in her 
broken soul. 

“ Darling,” he said, tenderly, “have you forgiven me?” 

At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, 
anguished eyes straight ahead of her at nothing; “I 
think I have, Blair. I have tried to. Of course I know 
I was more wicked than you. It was more my doing 
than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if you would for¬ 
give me.” 


27.') 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so 
happy I Am I to forgive you for making me happy ?” 

“Blair,” she said—she put the palms of her hands to¬ 
gether, like a child; “Blair, please let me go.” She 
looked at him with speechless entreaty. The old domxi- 
nant Elizabeth was gone; here was nothing but the weak 
thing, the scared thing, pleading, crouching, begging for 
mercy. “Please, Blair, please —” 

But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it 
made an appeal to passion rather than to mercy. It 
made him love her more, not pity her more. “I can’t 
let you go, Elizabeth,” he said, hoarsely; “I can’t: I 
love you—I will never let you go! I will die before i 
will let you go!” 

With that cry of complete egotism from him, the 
storm which her egotism had let loose upon their little 
world broke over her own head. As the sense of the 
hopelessness of her position and the futility of her strug¬ 
gle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to the point of 
violence. She was outrageous in what she said to him— 
beating against the walls of this prison-house of marriage 
which she herself had reared about them, and crying 
wildly for freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was 
never the fury of temper; it was the fury of fear. In her 
voice there was a new note, a note of entreaty; she de¬ 
manded, but not with the old invincible determination 
of the free Elizabeth. She was now only the w'oman 
pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband. 

Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threat¬ 
ened, never lost a gentleness that had sprung up in him 
side by side with love. It was, of course, the gentleness 
of power, although he did not realize that, for he was ab¬ 
jectly frightened; he never stopped to reassure himself by 
remembering that, after all, rave as she might, she was 
his! He was incredibly soft with her—up to a certain 
point: “I will never let you go!” If his god spoke, the 
whisper was drowned in that gale of selfishness. Eliza- 

276 


THE IRON WOMAN 


beth, now, was the flint, striking that she might kindle in 
Blair some fire of anger which would burn up the whole ed¬ 
ifice of her despair. But he opposed to her fiercest blows 
of terror and entreaty nothing but this softness of fright¬ 
ened love and unconscious power. He cowered at the 
thought of losing her; he entreated her pity, her mercy; 
he wept before her. The whole scene in that room in the 
inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the windows, was 
one of dreadful abasement and brutality on both sides. 

am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I 
will kill myself first. I am going away. I am going 
away to-night.’' 

“Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I 
love you; think I And —he wouldn’t want you, since you 
threw him over. You couldn’t go back to him.” 

“Go back to David? now? How can you say such a 
thing! I am dead, so far as he is concerned. Oh—oh— 
oh,—^why am I not dead? Why do I go on living? I 
will kill myself rather than stay with you!” It seemed 
to Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had for¬ 
gotten that she had meant to write him a terrible letter. 
She had forgotten everything but the blasting realiza¬ 
tion of what had happened to her. “Do not dare to 
speak his name!” she said, frantically. “I cannot bear 
it! I cannot bear it! I am dead to him. He despises 
me, as I despise myself. Blair, I can’t—I can’t live; 
I can’t go on—” 

In the end he conquered. There were two days and 
nights of struggle; and then she yielded. Blair’s re¬ 
iterated appeal was to her sense of justice. Curiously, 
but most characteristically, through all the clamor of her 
despair at this incredible thing that she had done, justice 
was the one word which penetrated to her consciousness. 
"Was it fair, she debated, numbly, in one of their long, 
aching silences, was it just, that because she had ruined 
herself, she should ruin him ? 

She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting 

277 


THE IRON WOMAN 


with her head on her arms that were stretched before her 
on a little table. Blair had gone out for one of his long, 
wretched walks through the snow; sometimes he took 
the landlord’s dog along for company, and on this partic¬ 
ular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cold, 
insolent wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for the 
hungry squirrels in the woods. As he walked he was 
planning, planning, planning, how he could make his 
misery touch Elizabeth’s heart; he was all unconscious 
that her misery had not yet touched his heart. But 
Elizabeth, locked in her room, was beginning to think of 
his misery. Dully at first, then with dreary concentra¬ 
tion, she went over in her mind his arguments and plead¬ 
ings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn’t love 
him; he had known what stakes he played for, and he 
was willing to abide by them; she ought to do the same; 
she had done this thing—she had married him, was it 
fair, now, to destroy him, soul and body, just because 
she had acted on a moment’s impulse ? In a crisis of ter¬ 
ror, his primitive instinct of self-preservation had swept 
away the acquired instinct of chivalry, and like a brutal 
boy, he had reminded her that she was to blame as well as 
he. “ You did it, too,” he told her, sullenly. She remem¬ 
bered that he had said he had not fully understood that 
it v/as only impulse on her part; “I thought you cared 
for me a little, or else you wouldn’t have married me.” 
In the panic of the moment he really had not known that 
he lied, and in her absorption in her own misery she did 
not contradict him. She ought, he said, to make the best 
of the situation; or else he v^^ould kill himself. “Do you 
want me to kill myself ?” he had threatened. If she would 
make the best of it, he would help her. He would do 
whatever she wished; he v/ould be her friend, her ser¬ 
vant,—until she should come to love him. 

“ I shall never love you,” she told him. 

“I will always love you! But I will not make you 
unhappy. Let me be your servant; that’s all I ask.” 

278 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I love David. I will always love him.” 

He had been silent at that; then broke again into a 
cry for mercy. “ I don’t care if you do love him! Don’t 
destroy me, Elizabeth.” 

He had had still one other weapon: they were married. 
There was no getting round that. The thing was done; 
except by Time and the outrageous scandal of publicity, 
it could not be undone. But this weapon he had not 
used, knowing perfectly well that the idea of public 
shame would be, just then, a matter of indifference to 
Elizabeth—perhaps even a satisfaction to her, as the 
sting of the penitential whip is a satisfaction to the 
sinner. All he said was summed up in three words: 
“Don’t destroy me.” 

There was no reply. She had fallen into a silence 
which frightened him more than her words. It was then 
that he went out for that walk on the creaking snow, in 
the sunshine and fierce wind, taking the bag of nuts along 
for the squirrels. Elizabeth, alone, her head on her 
arms on the table, went over and over his threats and 
entreaties, until it seemed as if her very mind was sore. 
After a while, for sheer weariness, she left the tangle of 
motives and facts and obligations, and began to think of 
David. It was then that she moaned a little under her 
breath. 

Twice she had tried to write to him to tell him what 
had happened. But each time she cringed away from 
her pen and paper. After all, what could she write? 
The fact said all there v/as to say, and he knew the 
fact by this time. When she said that, her mind, 
drawn oy some horrible curiosity, would begin to spec¬ 
ulate as to how he had heard the fact? Who told 
him? What did he say? How did he—and here she 
would groan aloud in an effort not to know “how” he 
took it! To save herself from this speculation which 
seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and handle the 
decaying body of love, she would plan what she should 
279 


THE IRON WOMAN 


say to him when, after a while, “to-morrow,” perhaps, 
she should be able to take up her pen: “David,—I was 
out of my head. Think of me as if I were dead.” . . . 
“David,—I don’t want you to forgive me. I want you 
to hate me as I hate myself.” . . . “David,—I was not 
in my right mind—forgive me. I love you just the 
same. But it is as if I were dead.” Again and again she 
had thought out long, crying, frightened letters to him; 
but she had not written them. And now she was be¬ 
ginning to feel, vaguely, that she would never write 
them. “What is the use? I am dead.” The idea of 
calling upon him to come and save her, never occurred 
to her. “I am dead,” she said, as she sat there, her 
face hidden in her arms; “there is nothing to be done.” 

After ""a while she stopped thinking of David and the 
letter she had not been able to write; it seemed as if, 
when she tried to make it clear to herself why she did not 
write to him, something stopped in her mind—a cog did 
not catch; the thought eluded her. When this hap¬ 
pened—as it had happened again and again in these last 
days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amaze¬ 
ment, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all 
proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy 
minute should ruin a whole life—two whole lives, hers 
and David’s. It was as if a pebble should deflect a river 
from its course, and make it turn and overflow a land¬ 
scape! It was incredible that so temporary a thing as 
an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. 
She gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the 
realization—which comes to most of us poor human 
creatures sooner or later—that sins may be forgiven, 
but their results remain. As for sin—^but surely that 
meaningless madness was not sin? “It was insanity,” 
she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the 
toll-house—that little mad hour, that brought eternity 
with it! She had had other crazy hours, with no such 
weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her 

280 


THE IRON WOMAN 


engagement: her loye, her happiness—and her tempers. 
Well, nothing had come of them. David always under¬ 
stood. And still further back: her careless, fiery girl¬ 
hood—when the knowledge of her mother’s recreancy, 
undermining her sense of responsibility by the con¬ 
doning suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to 
excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had been 
full of those outbreaks of passion, which she “ couldn’t 
help they were all meaningless, and all harmless, too; 
at any rate they were all without results of pain to her. 

Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the 
roaring gulf that separated her from the past, that all 
her life had been just a sunny slope down to the edge 
of the gulf. All those “harmless” tempers which had 
had no results, had pushed her to this result! 

Her poor, bright, shamed head lay so long and so still 
on her folded arms that one looking in upon her might 
have thought her dead. Perhaps, in a way, Elizabeth 
did die then, when her heart seemed to break with the 
knowledge that it is impossible to escape from yesterday. 
“Oh,” she said, brokenly, “why didn’t somebody tell 
me? Why didn’t they stop me?” But she did not 
dwell upon the responsibility of other people. She 
forgot the easy excuse of ‘heredity.’ This new know¬ 
ledge brought with it a vision of her own responsibility 
ddiat filled her appalled mind to the exclusion of every¬ 
thing else. It is not the pebble that turns the cur¬ 
rent—it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life 
Elizabeth had been inviting this moment; and the mo¬ 
ment, when it came, was her Day of Judgment. What 
she had thought of as an incredible injustice of fate in 
letting a mad instant turn the scales for a whole life, was 
merely an inevitable result of all that had preceded 
it. When this fierce and saving knowledge came to 
her, she thought of Blair. “I have spoiled my own life 
and David’s Jife. I needn’t spoil Blair’s. He said if I 
left him, it would destroy him. . . . Perhaps if I stay, 

281 


THE IRON WOMAN 


it will be my punishment. I can never be punished 
enough.” 

When Blair came home, she was standing with her 
forehead against the window, her dry eyes watching the 
dazzling white world. 

Coming up behind her, he took her hand and kissed it 
humbly. She turned and looked at him with somber 
eyes. 

“Poor Blair,” she said. 

And Blair, under his breath, said, “Thank God!’^ 


CHAPTER XXIV 


The coming back to Mercer some six weeks later was 
to Blair a miserable and skulking experience. To Eliza¬ 
beth it was almost a matter of indifference; there is a 
shame which goes too deep for embarrassment. The 
night they arrived at the River House, Nannie and Miss 
White were waiting for them, tearful and disapproving, 
of course, but distinctly excited and romantic. After 
all, Elizabeth was a “bride!” and Cherry-pie and Nan¬ 
nie couldn’t help being fluttered. Blair listened with 
open amusement to their half-scared gossip of what 
people thought, and what the newspapers had said, and 
how “very displeased” his mother had been; but Eliza¬ 
beth hardly heard them. At the end of the call, while 
Blair was bidding Nannie tell his mother he was coming 
to see her in the morning. Miss White, kissing her 
“lamb” good night, tried to whisper something in her 
ear: ''He said to tell you—” “No—no—no,—I can’t 
hear it; I can’t bear it yet!” Elizabeth broke in; she 
put her hands over her eyes, shivering so that Cherry- 
pie forgot David and his message, and even her child’s 
bad behavior. 

“ Elizabeth! you’ve taken cold ?” 

Elizabeth drew away, smiling faintly. “No; not at 
all. I’m tired. Please don’t stay.” And with the 
message still unspoken. Miss White and Nannie went off 
together, as fluttering and frightened as when they came. 

The newspaper excitement which had followed the 
announcement of the elopement of Sarah Maitland’s son, 
had subsided, so there was only a brief notice the mom- 
283 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ing after their arrival in town, to the effect that “the 
bride and groom had returned to their native city for a 
short stay before sailing for Europe.” Still, even though 
the papers were inclined to let them alone, it would be 
pleasanter, Blair told his wife, to go abroad. 

“Well,” she said, dully. Elizabeth was always dull 
now. She had lifted herself up to the altar, but there was 
no exaltation of sacrifice; possibly because she considered 
her sacrifice a punishment for her sin, but also because 
she was still physically and morally stunned. 

“ Of course there is nobody in Mercer for whose opinion 
I care a copper,” Blair said. They were sitting in their 
parlor at the hotel; Elizabeth staring out of the win¬ 
dow at the river, Blair leaning forward in his chair, 
touching once in a while, with timid fingers, a fold of 
her skirt that brushed his knee. “Of course I don’t 
care for a lot of gossiping old hens, but it will be pleas¬ 
anter for you not to be meeting people, perhaps?” he 
said gently. 

There was only one person whom he himself shrank 
from meeting—his mother. And this shrinking was not 
because of the peculiar shame which the thought of Mrs. 
Richie had awakened in him that morning in the woods, 
when the vision of her delicate scorn had been so unbear¬ 
able; his feeling about his mother was sheer disgust at 
the prospect of an interview which was sure to be esthet- 
ically distressing. While he was still absent on what the 
papers called his “wedding tour,” Nannie had written 
to him warning him what he might expect from Mrs. • 
Maitland: 

“Mamma is terribly displeased, I am afraid, though 
she hasn’t said a word since the night I told her. Then 
she said very severe things—and oh, Blair, dear, why 
did you do it the way you did ? I think Elizabeth was 
perfectly—” The unfinished sentence was scratched 
out. “You must be nice to- Mamma when you come 
home,” she ended. 


284 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“‘She’ll kick,” Blair said, sighing; “she’ll row like a 
puddler!” In his own mind, he added that, after all, 
no amount of kicking would alter the fact. And again 
the little exultant smile came about his lips. “As for 
being ‘nice,’ Nannie might as well talk about being 'nice' 
to a circular saw,” he said, gaily. His efforts to be gay, 
to amuse or interest Elizabeth, were almost pathetic 
in their intensity. “Well! the sooner I’ll go, the 
sooner I’ll get it over!” he said, and reached for his 
hat; Elizabeth was silent. “You might wish me luck!” 
he said. She did not answer, and he sighed and left 
her. 

As he loitered down to Shantytown, lying in the muddy 
drizzle of a midwinter thaw, he planned how soon he 
could get away from the detestable place. “Everything 
is so perfectly hideous,” he said to himself, “no w'onder 
she is low-spirited. When I get her over m Europe sne n 
forget Mercer,and—everything disagreeable.” His mind 
shied away from even the name of the man he had 
robbed. 

At his mother’s house, he had a hurried word with 
Nannie in the parlor: “Is she upset still? She mustn’t 
blame Elizabeth! It was all my doing. I sort of swept 
Elizabeth off her feet, you know. Well—it’s another 
case of getting your tooth pulled quickly. Here goes!” 
When he opened the dining-room door, his mother called 
to him from her bedroom; “Come in here,” she said; 
and there was something in her voice that made him 
brace himself. “ I’m in for it,” he said, under his breath. 

For years Sarah Maitland’s son had not seen her 
room; the sight of it now was a curious shock that 
seemed to push him back into his youth, and into that 
old embarrassment which he had always felt in her 
presence. The room was as it had been then, very bare 
and almost squalid; there was no carpet on the floor, and 
no hint of feminine comfort in a lounge or even a soft 
chair. That morning the inside shutters on the lower 

28s 


THE IRON WOMAN 


half of the uncurtained windows were still closed, and 
the upper light, striking cold and bleak across the dingy 
ceiling, glimmered on the glass doors of the bookcases 
behind which, in his childhood, had lurked such mysteri¬ 
ous terrors. The narrow iron bed had not yet been 
made up, and the bedclothes were in confusion on the 
back of a chair; the painted pine bureau was thick with 
dust; on it was the still unopened cologne bottle, its kid 
cover cracked and yellow under its faded ribbons, and 
three small photographs: Blair, a baby in a white dress, 
a little boy with long trousers and a visored cap; a big 
boy of twelve with a wooden gun. They were brown 
with time, and the figures were almost undistinguishable, 
but Blair recognized them,—and again his armor of 
courage was penetrated. 

“Well, Mother,” he said, with great directness and 
with at least an effort at heartiness, “ I am afraid you are 
rather disgusted with me.” 

“Are you?” she said; she was sitting sidewise on a 
wooden chair—what is called a “kitchen chair”; she 
had rested her arm along its back, and as Blair entered, 
her large, beautiful hand, drooping limply from its wrist, 
closed slowly into an iron fist. 

“ No, I won’t sit down, thank you,” he said, and stood, 
lounging a little, with an elbow on the mantelpiece. 
“Yes; I was afraid you would be displeased,” he went 
on, good-humoredly; “but I hope you won’t mind so 
much when I tell you about it. I couldn’t really go into 
it in my letter. By the way, I hope my absence hasn’t 
inconvenienced you in the office?” 

“Well, not seriously,” she said dryly. And he felt 
the color rise in his face. That he was frightfully ill at 
ease was obvious in the elaborate carelessness with which 
he began to inquire about the Works. But her only 
answer to his meaningless questions was silence. Blair 
was conscious that he was breathing quickly, and that 
made him angry. “Why am I such an ass?” he asked 
286 


THE IRON WOMAN 


himself; then said, with studied lightness, that he was 
afraid he would have to absent Himself from business for 
still a little longer, as he was going abroad. Fortunately 
—here the old sarcastic politeness broke into his really se¬ 
rious purpose to be respectful; fortunately he was so 
unimportant that his absence didn’t really matter. 
'‘You are the Works, you know. Mother.” 

‘‘You are certainly unimportant,” she agreed. He 
noticed she had not taken up her knitting, though a ball 
of pink worsted and a half-finished baby sock lay on the 
bureau near her; this unwonted quiet of her hands, to¬ 
gether with the extraordinary solemnity of her face, gave 
him a sense of uneasy astonishment. He would almost 
have welcomed one of those brutal outbursts which set 
his teeth on edge by their very ugliness. He did not 
know how to treat this new dignity. 

‘‘I would like to tell you just what happened,” he 
began, with a seriousness that matched her own. ‘‘Eliz¬ 
abeth had made up her mind not to marry David Richie. 
They had had some falling out, I believe. I never asked 
what; of course that wasn't my business. Well, I had 
been in love with her for months; but I didn’t suppose I 
had a ghost of a chance; of course I wouldn’t have dreamed 
of trying to—^to take her from him. But when she broke 
with him, why, I felt that I had a—a right, you know.” 

His mother was silent, but she struck the back of her 
chair softly with her closed fist: her eyebrow began to 
lift ominously. 

“Well; we thought—I mean I thought; that the 
easiest way all round was to get married at once. Not 
discuss it, you know, with people; but just—well, in 
point of fact, I persuaded her to run off with me!” He 
tried to laugh, but his mother’s face was rigid. She was 
looking at him closely, but she said nothing. By this 
time her continued silence had made him so nervous- 
that he went through his explanation again from begin* 
ning to end. Still she did not speak. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“You see, Mother,” he said, reddening with the dis¬ 
comfort of the moment, “you see it was best to do it 
quickly? Elizabeth’s engagement being broken, there 
was no reason to wait. But I do regret that I could not 
have told you first. I fear you felt—^annoyed.” 

“Annoyed?” For a moment she smiled. “Well, I 
should hardly call it ‘annoyed.’” Suddenly she made a 
gesture with her hand, as if to say, stop all this non¬ 
sense! “Blair,” she said, “I’m not going to go into this 
business of your marriage at all. It’s done.” Blair drew 
a breath of astonished relief. “ You’ve not only done a 
wicked thing, which is bad; you’ve done a fool thing, 
which is worse. I have some sort of patience with a 
knave, but a fool—‘annoys’ me, as you express it. 
You’ve married a girl who loves another man. You 
may or may not repent your wickedness—^you and I 
have different ideas on such subjects; but you’ll certainly 
repent your foolishness. When you are eaten up with 
jealousy of David, you’ll wish you had behaved decent¬ 
ly. I know what I’m talking about ”—she paused, look¬ 
ing down at her fingers picking nervously at the back of 
the chair; “I’ve been jealous,” she said in a low voice. 
Then, with a quick breath: “ However, wicked or foolish, 
or both, it’s doney and I’m not going to waste my time 
talking about it.” 

“You’re very kind,” he said; he was so bewildered 
by this unexpected mildness that he could not think 
what to say next. “I very much appreciate your 
overlooking my not telling you about it before I did it. 
The—^the fact was,” he began to stammer; her face was 
not reassuring; “the fact was, it was all so hurried, I—” 

But she was not listening. “You say you mean to go 
to Europe; how?” 

“How?” he repeated. “I don’t know just what you 
mean. Of course I shall be sorry to leave the Works, 
but under the circumstances—” 

“ It costs money to go to Europe. Have you got any 
288 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“My salary—’* 

“How can you have a salary when you don’t do any 
work?’’ 

Blair was silent; then he said, frowning, something 
about his mother’s always having been so kind— 

“ Kind ?’’ she broke in, “ you call it kind ? Well, Blair, 
I am going to be kind now—^another way. So far as I’m 
concerned, you’ll not have one dollar that you don’t 
earn.’’ 

He looked perfectly uncomprehending. 

“ I’ve done being ‘kind,’ in the way that’s ruined you, 
and made you a useless fool. I’m going to try another 
sort of kindness. You can work, my son, or you can 
starve.’’ Her face quivered as she spoke. 

“What do you mean?’’ Blair said, quietly; his em¬ 
barrassment fell from him like a slipping cloak; he was 
suddenly and ruthlessly a man. 

She told him what she meant. “ This business of your 
marrying Elizabeth isn’t the important thing; that’s 
just a symptom of your disease. It’s the fact of your 
being the sort of man you are, that’s important.’’ Blair 
was silent. Then Sarah Maitland began her statement 
of the situation as she saw it; she told him just what 
sort of a man he was: indolent, useless, helpless, selfish. 
“Until now I’ve always said that at any rate you were 
harmless. I can’t say even that now!’’ She tried to 
explain that when a man lives on money he has not 
earned, he incurs, by merely living, a debt of honor;— 
that God will collect. But she did not know how to 
say it. Instead, she told him he was a parasite;—which 
loathsome truth was like oil on the flames of his 
slowly gathering rage. He was a man, she said, whose 
business in life was to enjoy himself. She tried to make 
clear to him that after youth,—perhaps even after 
childhood,—enjoyment, as the purpose of effort, was 
dwarfing. “You are sort of a dwarf, Blair,’’ she said, 
with curiously impersonal brutality. Any enjoyment* 
289 


THE IRON WOMAN 


she insisted, that was worthy of a man, was only a 
by-product, as you might call it, of effort for some 
other purpose than enjoyment. “One of our pud- 
dlers enjoys doing a good job, I guess;—but that isn’t 
why he does it,” she said, shrewdly. Any man whose 
sole effort was to get pleasure is, considering what 
kind of a world we live in, a poor creature. “That’s 
the best that can be said for him,” she said; “as 
for the worst, we won’t go into that. You know it 
even better than I do.” Then she told him that his 
best, which had been harmlessness, and his worst, 
which they “would not go into”—were both more her 
fault than his. It was her fault that he was such a poor 
creature; “a pithless creature; I’ve made you so!” she 
said. She stopped, her face moving with emotion. 
“I’ve robbed you of incentive; I see that now. Any 
man who has the need of work taken away from him, is 
robbed. I guess enjoyment is all that is left for him. 
I ask your pardon.” Her humility was pitiful, but her 
words were outrageous. “ You are young yet,” she said; 
“ I think what I am going to do will cure you. If it 
doesn’t, God knows what will become of you!” It w^as 
the cure of the surgeon’s knife, ruthless, radical; it was. 
in fact, kill or cure; she knew that. “Of course it’s 
a gamble,” she admitted, and paused, nibbling at her 
finger; “a gamble. But I’ve got to take it.” She 
spoke of it as she might of some speculative business 
decision. She looked at him as if imploring comprehen¬ 
sion, but she had to speak as she thought, wdth sledge¬ 
hammer directness. “ It takes brains to make money— 
I know because I’ve made it; but any fool can inherit it, 
just as any fool can accept it. Fm going to give 
you a chance to develop some brains. You can work 
or you can starve. Or,” she added simply, “you can 
beg. You have begged practically all your life, thanks 
to me.” 

If only she could have said it all differently! But 
290 


THE IRON WOMAN 


alas! yearning over him with agonized consciousness of 
her own wrong-doing, and wdth singular justice in regard 
to his, she approached his selfish heart as if it were one 
of her own “blooms,” and she a great engine which could 
mold and squeeze it into something of value to the 
world. She flung her iron facts at him, regardless of the 
bruises they must leave upon that most precious thing, 
his self-respect. Well; she was going to stop her work of 
destruction, she said. Then she told him how she pro¬ 
posed to do it: he had had everything—and he was 
nothing. Now he should have nothing, so that he might 
become something. 

There was a day, many years ago, when this mother 
and son, standing together, had looked at the fierce 
beauty of molten iron; then she had told him of high 
things hidden in the seething and shimmering metal— 
of dreams to be realized, of splendid toils, of vast am¬ 
bitions. And as she spoke, a spark of vivid understand¬ 
ing had leaped from his mind to hers. Now, her iron 
will, melted by the fires of love, was seething and glowing, 
dazzlingly bright in the white heat of complete self- 
renunciation ; it was ready to be poured into a torturing 
mold to make a tool with which he might save his soul! 
But no spark of understanding came into his angry eyes. 
She did not pause for that; his agreement was a secon¬ 
dary matter. The habit of success made her believe that 
she could achieve the impossible—namely, save a man’s 
soul in spite of himself; “make,” as she had told Robert 
Ferguson, “a man of her son.” She would have been 
glad to have his agreement, but she would not wait 
for it. 

Blair listened in absolute silence. “Do I under¬ 
stand,” he said when she had finished, “that you mean 
to disinherit me?” 

“ I mean to give you the finest inheritance a young 
man can have: the necessity for work !—and work for the 
necessity. For, of course, your job is open to you in the 

201 


THE IRON WOMAN 


office. But it will be at an honest salary after this; the 
salary any other unskilled man would get." 

“Please make yourself clear," he said laconically; 
“you propose to leave me no money when you die?" 

“Exactly." 

“May I ask how you expect me to live?" 

“The way most decent men live —hy work. You can 
work; or else, as I said, you can starve. There’s a verse 
in the Bible—you don’t know your Bible very well; per¬ 
haps that’s one reason you have turned out as you have; 
but there’s a verse in the Bible that says if a man won’t 
work, he sha’n’t eat. That’s the best political economy 
I know. But I never thought of it before," she said 
simply; “I never realized that the worst handicap a 
young man can have in starting out in life is a rich 
father—or mother. Ferguson used to tell me so, but 
somehow I never took it in." 

“So," he said—he was holding his cane in both hands, 
and as he spoke he struck it across his knees, breaking it 
with a splintering snap; “so, you’ll disinherit me because 
I married the girl I love?" 

“No!" she said, eager to make herself clear; “no, not 
at all! Don’t you understand? (My God! how can I 
make him understand?) I disinherit you to make a 
man of you, so that your father won’t be ashamed of 
you—as I am. Yes, I owe it to your father to make a 
man of you; if it can be done." 

vShe rose, with a deep breath, and stood for an instant 
silent, her big hands on her hips, her head bent. Then, 
solemnly: “That is all; you may go, my son." 

Blair got on to his feet with a loud laugh—a laugh 
singularly like her own. “Well," he said, ''lwillgo\ 
And I’ll never come back. This lets me out! You’ve 
thrown me over: I’ll throw you over. I think the law 
will have something to say to this disinheritance idea of 
yours; but until then—^take a job in your Works? I’ll 
starve first! So help me God, I’ll forget that you are my 
292 


THE IRON WOMAN 


mother; it will be easy enough, for the only womanly 
thing about you is your dress”—she winced, and flung 
her hand across her face as if he had struck her. “If I 
can forget that I am your son, starvation will be a cheap 
price. We’ve always hated each other, and it’s a relief 
to come out into the open and say so. No more gush for 
either of us!” He actually looked like her, as he hurled 
his insults at her. He picked up his coat and left the 
room; he was trembling all over. 

She, too, began to tremble; she looked after him as 
he slammed the door, half rose, bent over and lifted the 
splintered pieces of his cane; then sat down, as if sud¬ 
denly weak. She put her hands over her face; there 
was a broken sound from behind them. 

That night she came into Nannie’s parlor and told 
her, briefly, that she meant to disinherit Blair. She even 
tried to explain why, according to her judgment, she 
must do so. But Nannie, appalled and crying, was 
incapable of understanding. 

“Oh, Mamma, don’t—don’t say such things! Tell 
Blair you take it back. You don’t mean it; I know you 
don’t! Disinherit Blair? Oh, it isn’t fair! Mamma, 
please forgive him, please—please—” 

“My dear,” said Sarah Maitland patiently, “it isn’t 
a question of forgiving Blair; I’m too busy trying to 
forgive myself.” Nannie looked at her in bewilderment. 
“Well, well, we won’t go into that,” said Mrs. Maitland; 
“you wouldn’t understand. What I came over to say, 
especially, was that if things can go back into the old 
ways I shall be glad. I reckon Blair won’t want to see 
me for a while, but if Elizabeth will come to the house 
as she used to, I sha’n’t rake up unpleasant subjects. 
She is your brother’s wife, and shall be treated with 
respect in my house. Tell her so. ’Night.” 

But Nannie, with a soft rush across the room, darted 
in front of her and stood with her back against the door, 

293 


THE IRON WOMAN 


panting. “Mamma! Wait. You must listen to me!” 
Her stepmother paused, looking at her with mild aston • 
ishment. She was like another creature, a little wild 
creature standing at bay to protect its young. “You 
have no right,” Nannie said sternly, “you have no right, 
Mother, to treat Blair so. Listen to me: it was not— 
not nice in him to run away with Elizabeth; I know that, 
though I think it was more her fault than his. But it 
wasn’t wicked! He loved her.” 

“My dear, I haven’t said it was wicked,” Blair’s 
mother tried to explain; “in fact, I don’t think it was; 
it wasn’t big enough to be wicked. No, it was only a 
dirty, contemptible trick.” Nannie cringed back, her 
hand gripping the knob behind her. “If Blair had been 
a hard-working man, knocking up against other hard- 
working men, trying to get food for his belly and clothes 
for his nakedness, he’d have been ashamed to play such 
a trick—he’d have been a man. If I had loved him 
more I’d have made a man of him; I’d have made work 
real to him, not make-believe, as I did. And I wouldn’t 
have been ashamed of him, as I am now.” 

“I think,” said Nannie, with one of those flashes of 
astuteness so characteristic of the simple mind, “that a 
man would fall in love just as much if he were poor as 
if he were rich; and—and you ought to forgive him, 
Mamma.” 

Mrs. Maitland half smiled: “I guess there’s no making 
you understand, Nannie; you are like your own mother. 
Come! Open this door! I’ve got to go to work.” 

But Nannie still stood with her hand gripping the 
knob. “I must tell you,” she said in a low voice: 
“I must not be untruthful to you. Mamma: I will give 
Blair all I have myself. The money my father left me 
shall be his; and—and everything I may ever have 
shall be his.” Then she seemed to melt away before 
her stepmother, and the door banged softly between them. 

“Poor little soul!” Sarah Maitland said to herself. 

294 


THE IRON WOMAN 


smiling, as she sat down at her desk in the dining-room. 
“Exactly like her mother! I must give her a present.’* 

The next day she sent for her general manager and 
told him what course she had taken with her son. He 
was silent for a moment; then he said, with an effort, 
“I have no reason to plead Blair’s cause, but you’re not 
fair, you know.” 

“So Nannie has informed me,” she said dryly. Then 
she leaned back in her chair and tapped her desk with 
one big finger. “Go on; say what you like. It won’t 
move me one hair.” 

Robert Ferguson said a good deal. He pointed out 
that she had no right, having crippled Blair, to tell him 
to run a race. “ You’ve made him what he is. Well, it’s 
done; it can’t be undone. But you are rushing to the 
other extreme; you needn’t leave him millions, of 
course; but leave him a reasonable fortune.” 

She meditated. “Perhaps a very small allowance,, 
in fact, to make my will sound I may have to. I must 
find out about that. But while I’m alive, not one cent. 
I never expected to be glad his father died before he 
was born, and so didn’t leave him anything, but I am. 
No, sir; my son can earn what he wants or he can go 
without. I’ve got to do my best to make up to him 
for all the harm I’ve done him, and this is the way to do 
it. Now, the next thing is to make my will sound. He 
says he’ll contest it”—she gave her grunt of amusement. 
“Pity I can’t see him do it! I’d like the fun of it. It 
will be cast-iron. If there was any doubt about it, I 
would realize on every security I own to-morrow and 
give it all away in one lump, now, while I’m alive—if I 
had to go hungry myself afterward! Will you ask Howe 
and Marston to send their Mr. Marston up here to draw up 
a new will for me ? I want to go to work on it to-night. 
I’ve thought it out pretty clearly, but it’s a big job, a big 
job! I don’t know myself exactly how much I’m worth 
—how much I’d clean up to, at any rate. But I’ve 

295 


THE IRON WOMAN 


got a list ot charities on my desk as long as your arm. 
Nannie will be the residuary legatee; she has some 
money from her father, too, though not very much. 
The Works didn’t amount to much when my husband 
was alive; he divided his share between Nannie and me; 
he—”; she paused, reddening faintly with that strange 
delicacy that lay hidden under the iron exterior; “he 
didn’t know Blair was coming along. Well, I sup¬ 
pose Nannie will give Blair something. In fact, she 
as good as warned me. Think of Nannie giving me 
notice! But as I say, she won’t have any too much 
herself. And, Mr. Ferguson, I want to tell you some¬ 
thing: I’m going to give David some money now. I 
mean in a year or two. A lot.” 

Robert Ferguson’s face darkened. “David doesn’t 
take money very easily.” 

Mrs. Maitland did not ask him to explain. She was 
absorbed in the most tremendous venture of her life— 
the saving of her son, and her plan for David was com¬ 
paratively unimportant. She put through the business of 
her will with extraordinary despatch and precision, and 
with a ruthlessness toward Blair that took her lawyer’s 
breath away; but she would not hear one word of protest. 

“ Your business, sir, is to see that this instrument is 
unbreakable,” she said, “not to tell me how to leave my 
money.” 

The day after the will was executed she wmnt to 
Philadelphia. “I am going to see David,” she told her 
general superintendent; “I want to get this affair off 
my mind so I can settle do^vn to my work, but I’ve 
got to square things up first with him. You’ll have to 
run the shop while I’m off!” 

She had written to David briefly, without preface or 
apology.* 

“Dear David, —Come and see me at the Girard 
House Tuesday morning at 7.45 o’clock.” 

296 


CHAPTER XXV 


Nearly two months had passed since that dreadful 
day when David Richie had gone to his mother to be 
comforted. In his journey back across the mountains 
his mind and body were tense with anticipation of the 
letter which he was confident was awaiting him in Phila¬ 
delphia. He was too restless to lie down in his berth. 
Once he went into the day coach and wandered up 
and down the aisle between the rows of huddled and un¬ 
comfortable humanity. Sometimes a sleepy passenger, 
hunched up on a plush seat, would swear at him for 
jostling a protruding foot, and once a drearily crying 
baby, propped against a fat and sleeping mother, 
clutched with dirty fingers at his coat. At that little 
feeble pull he stopped and looked down at the small, 
wabbling head, then bent over and lifted the child, 
straightening its rumpled clothes and cuddling it against 
his shoulder. The baby gurgled softly in his ear—and 
instantly he remembered the baby he had seen on the raft 
the night that he first knew he was in love with Eliza¬ 
beth. When he went back to the smoking-compartment 
and sat down, his hands deep in his pockets, his head 
sunk between his shoulders, his hat pulled down over his 
eyes, he thought of that raft baby and wondered if it 
were alive. But such thoughts were only in the moments 
when his bruised mind could not steady itself on what 
had happened to him. Most of the time he was saying, 
over and over, just what he was going to do the next morn¬ 
ing : he would get into the station; take a cab; drive to 
the hospital —a dozen times that night his thumb and 

297 


THE IRON WOMAN 


finger sought his waistcoat pocket for a bill to hasten the 
driver of that cab! leap out, run up the stairs to the 
mail-rack beside the receiving clerk’s desk, seize Eliza¬ 
beth’s letter—here the pause would come, the moment 
when his body relaxed, and something seemed to melt 
within him: suppose the letter was not there? Very 
well: back to the cab! another tip; hurry! hurry! 
hurry! His mother’s house, the steps, his key in the 
lock—^again and again his fingers closed on the key-ring 
in his pocket! letters on the hall table awaiting him —her 
letter. Then again the relaxing shock: suppose it was not 
there ? The thought turned him sick; after the almost 
physical recoil from it, came brief moments of longing 
for his mother’s tender arms, or the remembrance of that 
baby on the raft. But almost immediately his mind 
would return to the treadmill of expectation; get into 
the station—take a cab—rush— So it went, on and 
on, until, toward dawn, through sheer exhaustion he 
slept. 

That next day was never very clear in David’s mem¬ 
ory. Only one fact stood out distinctly in the mists: 
there was no letter. Afterward, when he tried to recall 
that time of discovering that she had not written, he 
was confused by the vision of his mother smiling down 
at him from the head of the stairs and calling to an un¬ 
seen maid, “Bring the doctor a cup of coffee, Mary!” 
He could remember that he stood sorting out the letters 
on the hall table, running them over swiftly, then going 
through them slowly, one by one, scanning each address, 
each post-mark; then, with shaking hands, shuffling and 
sorting them like a pack of cards, and going through 
them again. She had not written. He could remember 
that he heard the blood beating in his ears, and at the 
same time his mother’s voice: “Bring the doctor a cup 
of coffee.” . . . She had not written. 

For months afterv/ard, when he tried to recall that 
trorning, the weak feeling in his knees, the way the 

298 


THE IRON WOMAN 


letters that were not from her shook in his hand, the 
sound of his mother’s joyous voice—^these things would 
come into his mind together. They were all he could 
remember of the whole day; the day when the grave 
closed over his youth. 

After that came hours of expectation, of telegrams 
back and forth: “Have you heard where they are?” 
And: “No news.” Weeks of letters between Robert 
Ferguson and his mother: “It is what I have always 
said, she is her mother’s daughter.” And: “Oh, don’t 
be so hard on her — and on her poor, bad mother. 
Find out where she is, and go and see her.” And: “I 
will never see her. I’m done with her.” But among 
all the letters, never any letter from Elizabeth to 
David. 

In those first days he seemed to live only when the 
mail arrived; but his passion of expectation was speech¬ 
less. Indeed his inarticulateness was a bad factor when 
it came to recovery from the blow that had been dealt 
him. At the moment when the wound was new, he had 
talked to his mother; but almost immediately he re¬ 
treated into silence. And in silence the worst things in his 
nature began to grow. Once he tried to write to Eliza¬ 
beth; the letter commenced with frantic directions to 
come to his mother “at once!” Then his pen faltered: 
perhaps she did not care to come? Perhaps she did 
not wish to leave “him”?—and the unfinished letter 
was flung into the fire. With suspicion of Elizabeth 
came a contemptuous distrust of human nature in general, 
and a shrinking self-consciousness, both entirely foreign 
to him. He was not only crushed by loss, but he was 
stinging with the organic mortification of the man who 
has not been able to keep his woman. It was then that 
Helena Richie first noticed a harshness in him that 
frightened her, and a cynical individualism that began 
to create its own code of morals, or at any rate of re¬ 
sponsibilities. But before he shut himself into all this 

299 


THE IRON WOMAN 


misery, not only of loss, but of suspicion and humilia¬ 
tion, he did say one thing: 

“I’m not going to howl; you needn’t be afraid. I 
shall do my work. You won’t hear me howl.’’ There 
were times when she wished he would! She wished it 
especially when Robert Ferguson wrote that Elizabeth 
and Blair were going to return to Mercer, that they 
would live at the River House, and that it was evident 
that the “annulment,” to which at first David’s mind 
had turned so incessantly, was not being thought of. “I 
understand from Miss White (of course I haven’t heard 
from or written to Mrs. Blair Maitland) that she does not 
wish to take any steps for a separation,” Elizabeth’s 
uncle wrote. 

“He must see her when she gets back,” Helena Richie 
said, softly; but David said nothing at all. At that 
moment his suspicion became a certainty;—^yes, she had 
loved the fellow! It had been something else than one 
of her fits of fury! It had been love. ... No wonder, 
with this poison working in him, that he shut even his 
mother out of his heart. At times the pitying tenderness 
of her eyes was intolerable to him; he thought he saw 
the same pity in everybody’s eyes; he felt sure that 
every casual acquaintance was thinking of what had 
happened to him: he said to himself he wished to God 
people would mind their business, and let him mind his! 
“I’m not howling,” he told himself. He was like a man 
whose skin has been taken off; he winced at everything, 
but all the same, he did his work in the hospital with 
exhausting thoroughness; to be sure he gave his patients 
nothing but technical care. Whether they lived or died 
was nothing to David; whether he himself lived or died 
was still less to him—except, perhaps, that in his own 
case he had a preference. But work is the only real seda¬ 
tive for grief, and the suffering man worked himself 
callous, so he had dull moments of forgetfulness, or at 
any rate of comparative indifference. Yet when he 
300 


THE IRON WOMAN 


received that note from Mrs. Maitland summoning him to 
her hotel he flinched under the callousness. Ho^iever, 
at a little before eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, he 
knocked at her bedroom door. 

The Girard House knew Sarah Maitland’s eccentricities 
as well as her credit; she always asked for a cheap room, 
and was always put up under the roof. She had never 
learned to use her money for her own comfort, so it never 
occurred to her to have a parlor for herself; her infre¬ 
quent callers were always shown up here to the top of the 
house. 

On this especial morning she had come directly from 
the train, and when David arrived she was pacing up and 
down the narrow room, haggard and disheveled from a 
night in the sleeping-car; she had not even taken off her 
bonnet. She turned at his step and stopped short in her 
tracks—he was so thin, so grim, so old! “Well, David,” 
she said; then hesitated, for there was just an instant’s 
recoil in David. He had not realized the fury that would 
leap up and scorch him like a flame at the sight of Blair’s 
mother. 

“David, you’ll—you’ll shake hands with me, won’t 
you?” she said timidly. At the sound of her voice his 
anger died out; only the cold ashes of misery were left. 

“Why, Mrs. Maitland!” he protested, and took her 
big, beautiful, unsteady hand in both of his. 

For a moment neither of them spoke. It was a dark, 
cold morning; far below them stretched the cheerless 
expanse of snow-covered roofs; from countless chimn.ey? 
smoke was rising heavily to the lowering sky, and soot 
was sifting down; the snow on the window-sill was 
speckled with black. Below, in the courtyard of the 
hotel, ice-carts rumbled in and out, and milk-cans were 
banged down on the cobblestones; a dull day, an empty 
sky, a futile interview, up here in this wretched little 
room under the eaves. David wondered how soon he 
could get away. 


301 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“David,” Mrs. Maitland said, “I know I can’t make 
it up to you in any way. But I’d like to.” 

“You are very kind,” he said coldly, “but we won’t 
go into that, if you please, Mrs. Maitland.” 

“No, we won’t talk about it,” she said, with evident 
relief; “but David, I came to Philadelphia to say that I 
want you to let me be of help to you in some way.” 

“Help to me?’' he repeated, surprised. “I really 
ion’1> see—” 

“V/hy,” she explained, “you want to begin to prac¬ 
tise; you don’t want to drudge along at a hospital under 
some big man’s thumb. I want to set you up!” 

David smiled involuntarily, “ But the hospital is my 
greatest chance, Mrs. Maitland. I’m lucky to have these 
three years there. But it’s kind in you to think of giving 
me a hand.” 

“Nonsense!’' she said, quite missing the force of what 
he said. “You ought to put out your own shingle. 
David, you can have all the money you need; it’s 
yours to take.” 

David started as if she had struck him: yours to take” 
Oh, that had been said to him before! “No, I can’t, 
I couldn't take money! You don’t understand. I 
couldn’t take money from—anybody!” he said with a 
gasp. 

She looked at him helplessly, then stretched out her 
empty hands. “David,” she said pitifully, “money is 
all I’ve got. Won’t you take it?” The tears were on 
her cheeks and the big, empty hands shook. “ I haven’t 
got anything but money, David,” she entreated. 

His face quivered; he said some broken, protesting 
word; then suddenly he put his arms round her and 
kissed her. Her gray head, in the battered old bon¬ 
net, rested a moment on his shoulder, and he felt her 
sob. “Oh, David,” she said, “what shall I do? He— 
he hates me. He said the onlv womanly thing about 
me was » . . Oh, can I make a man of him, do you 
302 


THH IRON WOMAN 


think?” She entirely forgot David’s wrongs m her cry 
for comfort, a cry that somehow penetrated to his be¬ 
numbed heart, for in his effort to comfort her he was 
himself vaguely comforted. For a minute he held her 
tightly in his arms until he was sure he could command 
himself. When he let her go, she put her hand up in a 
bewildered way and touched her cheek; the boy had 
kissed her! But by that time she was able to go back to 
the purpose that had brought her here; she told him to 
sit down and then began, dogmatically, to insist upon 
her plan. 

David smiled a little as he explained that, quite apart 
from any question of income, the hospital experience 
was valuable to him. “I wouldn’t give it up, Mrs. 
Maitland, if I had a million dollars!” he said, with a 
convincing exaggeration that was like the old David. 
“But it’s mighty kind in you. Please believe I do ap 
preciate your kindness.” 

“No kindness about it,” she said impatiently; “my 
family is in your debt, David.” At which he hardened 
instantly. 

“Well,” she said; and was silent for awhile, biting her 
finger and looking down at her boots. Suddenly, with a 
grunt of satisfaction, she began to hit the arm of her 
chair softly with her closed fist. “ I’ve got it!” she said. 
“I suppose you wouldn’t refuse the trusteeship of a 
fund, one of these days, to build a hospital? Near my 
Works, maybe? i’m all the time having accidents, I 
remember once getting a filing in my eye, and—and 
somebody suggested a doctor to take it out. A doctor 
for a filing! I guess you'd have been equal to that job— 
young as you are? Still, it wouldn’t be bad to have a 
doctor round, even if he was young, if anything serious 
happened. Yes, a hospital near the Works—first for 
my men and then for outsiders. It is a good idea! I 
suppose you wouldn’t refuse to run such a hospital, and 
draw your w^ages, like a man ?” 

20 



THE IRON WOMAN 


'‘Well, no, I wouldn’t refuse that,” he said, smiling, 
it was many weeks since David had smiled so frankly. 
A strange thing had happened in that moment when he 
had forgotten himself in trying to comfort Blair’s mother 
—his corroding suspicion of Elizabeth seemed to melt 
away! In its place was to come, a little later, the dread¬ 
ful but far more bearable pain of enduring remorse for 
his own responsibility for Elizabeth’s act. But just then, 
when he tried to comfort that poor mother, there was 
only a breaking of the ice about his own heart in a warm 
gush of pity for her. ...” I don’t see that there’s much 
chance of fimds for hospitals coming mv way,” he said, 
smiling. 

“You never can tell,” said Mrs. Maitland. 


CHAPTER XXVI 


The morning Blair heard his sentence from his mother^ 
Elizabeth spent in her parlor in the hotel, looking idly out 
of the window at the tawny current of the river covered 
with its slipping sheen of oil. Steamboats were pushing up 
and down or nosing into the sand to unload their cargoes; 
she could hear the creak of hawsers, the bang of gang¬ 
planks thrown across to the shore, the cries and songs 
of stevedores sweating and toiling on the wharf that was 
piled with bales of cotton, endless blue barrels of oil, 
and black avalanches of coal. She did not think of 
Blair’s ordeal; she was not interested in it. She was not 
interested in anything. Sometimes she thought vaguely 
of the letter which had never been and would never be 
written to David, and sometimes of that message from him 
which she had not yet been able to hear from Miss White’s 
lips; but for the most part she did not think of anything. 
She .was tired of thinking. She sat huddled in a chair, 
' staring dully out of the window; she was like a captive 
bird, moping on its perch, its poor bright head sinking 
down into its tarnished feathers. She was so absorbed 
in the noise and confusion of traffic that she did not 
hear a knock. When it was repeated, she rose listlessly 
to answer it, but before she reached the door it opened, 
and her uncle entered. Elizabeth backed away silently. 
He followed her, but for a moment he was silent, too— 
it seemed to Robert Ferguson as if youth had been 
wiped out of her face. Under the shock of the change 
in her, he found for a moment nothing to say. When 
he spoke his voice trembled—with anger, she thought, 

^05 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ Mrs. Richie wrote me that I must come and see you^ 
I told her I would have nothing to do with you.” 

Elizabeth sat down without speaking. 

“I don’t see what good it does to come,” he said, 
staring at the tragic face. ‘‘Of course you know my 
opinion of you.” She nodded. “So why should I 
come?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, I—I’m here. And you may come home some¬ 
times, if you want to. Miss White is willing to see you, 
I believe.” 

“Thank you, Uncle Robert.” 

As she spoke the door of the elevator in the hall clanged 
shut, and the next moment Blair entered. He carried 
a loose twist of white paper in his arms, and when, at the 
sight of Robert Ferguson, he tossed it down on the 
table it fell open, and the fragrance of roses overflowed 
into the room. Raging from the lash of his mother’s 
tongue, he had rushed back to the hotel to tell Elizabeth 
what had happened, but in spite of his haste he stopped 
on the way to get her some flowers. He did not think 
of them now, nor even of his own wrongs, for here was 
Robert Ferguson attacking her! “Mr. Ferguson,” he 
said, quietly, but reddening to his temples, “of course 
you know that in the matter of Elizabeth’s hasty mar¬ 
riage I am the only one to blame. But though you 
blame me, I hope you will believe that I will do my best 
to make her happy.” 

“I believe,” said Elizabeth’s uncle, “that you are a 
damned scoundrel.” He took up his hat and began to 
smooth the nap on his arm; then he turned to Eliza¬ 
beth—and in his heart he damned Blair Maitland more 
vigorously than before: the lovely color had all been 
washed away by tears, the amber eyes were dull, 
even the brightness of her hair seemed dimmed. It was 
as if something had breathed upon the sparkle and clear¬ 
ness; it was like seeing her through a mist. So, barking 
306 



"OF COURSE YOU KNOW MY OPINION OF YOU.” Page 306. 

—The Iron Woman 














THE IRON WOMAN 


fiercely to keep his lip from shaking, he said: “And I 
hope you understand, Elizabeth, I have no respect for 
you, either.” 

She looked up with faint surprise. “Why, of course 
not.” 

“I insist,” Blair said, peremptorily, “that you address 
m}^ wife with respect or leave her presence.” 

Mr. Ferguson put his hat down on the table, not 
noticing that the roses spotted it with their wet petals, 
and stared at him. “Well, upon my word!” he said. 
“Do you think I need you to instruct me in my duty to 
my niece?” Then, with sudden, cruel insight, he added, 
“David Richie’s mother has done that.” As he spoke 
he bent over and kissed Elizabeth. Instantly, with a 
smothered cry, she clung to him. There was just a 
moment when, her head on his breast, he felt her soft 
hair against his cheek—and a minute later, she felt 
something wet on her cheek. They had both forgotten 
Blair. He slunk away and left them alone. 

Robert Ferguson straightened up with a jerk. “ Where 
—where—where’s my hat!” he said, angrily; “she said 
I was hard. She doesn’t know everything!” But 
Elizabeth caught his hand and held it tc her lips. 

When Blair came back she was quite gentle to him; 
yes, the roses were very pretty; yes, very sweet. “Thank 
you, Blair,” she said; but she did not ask him about his 
interview with his mother; she had forgotten it. He 
took the stab of her indifference without wincing; but 
suddenly he was comforted, for when he began to tell her 
what his mother was going to do, she was sharply aroused. 
She lifted her head—that spirited head which in the old 
days had never drooped; and looked at him in absolute 
dismay. Blair was being punished for a crime that was 
more hers than his! 

“Oh,” she said, “it isn’t fair! I’m the one to blame; 
it isn’t fair!” 

The indignation in her voice made his heart leap. 

.307 


THE IRON WOMAN 


** Of course it isn’t fair. But Elizabeth, I would pay any 
price to know that you were my wife.” He tried to take 
her hand, but she pushed him aside and began to pace 
about the room. 

“It isn’t right!” she said; “she sha’n’t treat you so!” 
She was almost like the old, furious Elizabeth in that 
gust of distress at her own responsibility for an injustice 
to him. But Blair dared to believe that her anger was 
for his sake, and to have her care that he should lose 
money made the loss almost welcome. He felt, through 
his rage at his mother, a thrill of purpose, a desire to 
amount to something, for Elizabeth’s sake—which, if 
she could have known it, might have comforted Sarah 
Maitland, sitting in her dreary bedroom, her face hidden 
in her hands. 

“Dearest, what do I care for her or her money?” he 
cried out; “7 have you!** 

Elizabeth was not listening to him; she was thinking 
what she could do to save him from his mother’s dis¬ 
pleasure. “I’ll go and see her, and tell her it was my 
fault,” she said to herself. She had a vague feeling that 
if she could soften Mrs. Maitland she and Blair would be 
quits. 

She did not tell him of her purpose, but the mere having 
a purpose made her face alert, and it seemed to him that 
she identified herself with him and his interests. His 
eager denial of her self-accusation that she had injured 
him, his ardent impulse to protect her from any remorse, 
to take all the blame of a possible “mistake” on his own 
shoulders, brought an astonishing unselfishness into his 
face. But Elizabeth would not let him blame himself. 

“It was all my fault,” she insisted. “I was out of 
my head!” 

At that he frowned sharply—“ when you are eaten 
up with jealousy,” his mother had said. Oh, he did 
not need his mother to tell him what jealousy meant: 
Elizabeth would not have married him if she had not 
308 


THE IRON WOMAN 


been ‘out of her head’! “She still thinks of him," he 
said to himself, as he had said many, many times in 
these two months of marriage—months of alternate 
ecstasies and angers, of hopes and despairs. As for her 
indignation at the way he had been treated, it meant 
nothing personal, after all. In his disappointment he 
went out of the room in hurt silence and left her to her 
thoughts of “him." This was the way most of their 
talks ended. 

But Elizabeth’s indignation did not end. In the next 
two days, while Mrs. Maitland was in Philadelphia 
making her naive offer to David, she brooded over the 
situation. “I won’t have Blair punished for my sins," 
she said to herself; “I won’t have it!" Her revolt at 
an injustice was a faint echo of her old violence. She 
had no one to talk to about it; Nannie was too shy to 
come to see her, and Miss White too tearful to be con¬ 
sulted. But she did not need advice; she knew what 
she must do. The afternoon following Mrs. Maitland’s 
return from Philadelphia she went to see her. . . , She 
found Nannie in the parlor, sitting forlornly at her 
drawing-board. Nannie had heard, of course, from 
Blair, the details of that interview with his mother, 
and in her scared anger she planned many ways of 
“ making Mamma nice to Blair," but she had not thought 
of Elizabeth’s assistance. She took it for granted that 
Elizabeth would not have the courage to “ face Mamma.” 

“I have come to see Mrs. Maitland," Elizabeth said. 
“Is she in the dining-room?" 

Nannie quailed. “Oh, Elizabeth! How do you dare? 
But do go; and make her forgive him. She wouldn’t 
listen to me. And after all, Elizabeth, you know that 
you —" 

“ Yes, I’m the one," Elizabeth said, briefly; and went 
swiftly across the hall. She stood for a moment by 
Sarah Maitland’s desk unnoticed. “Mrs. Maitland!" 
Elizabeth’s voice was peremptory. 

309 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Blair’s mother put her pen down and looked up over 
her spectacles. “Oh—Elizabeth?” 

“Mrs. Maitland, I came to tell you that you must not 
be angry at Blair. It was all my fault.” 

“ I guess, as I told your uncle, it was the pot and the 
kettle, Elizabeth.” 

"No, no! I was angry, and I was—willing.” 

“ Do you think it excuses Blair if you did throw your¬ 
self at his head?” 

Elizabeth, who had thought that no lesser wound than 
the one she had dealt herself could hurt her, flinched. 
But she did not defend herself. “ I think it does excuse 
liim to some extent, and that is why I have come to ask 
you to forgive him.” 

“Oh,” said Mrs. Maitland, and paused; then with 
most disconcerting suddenness, sneezed violently and 
blew her nose; “bless you, I’ve forgiven him.” 

“Then,” said Elizabeth, with a gasp of relief, “you 
won’t disinherit him!” 

“Disinherit him? What’s that got to do with for¬ 
giving him ? Of course I will disinherit him,—or rather, 
I have. My will is made; signed, sealed. I’ve left him 
an income of a thousand dollars a year. That will keep 
you from starvation. If Blair is worth more he’ll earn 
more. If he isn’t, he can live on a thousand dollars—as 
better men than he have done. Or he can go to the 
workhouse;—your uncle can take care of you. I reckon 
I’ve paid taxes in this county long enough to entitle my 
son to go to the workhouse if he wants to.” 

“But Mrs. Maitland,” Elizabeth protested, hotly, 
“it isn’t fair, just because I—I let him marry me, to 
punish him—” 

Mrs. Maitland struck her fist on the arm of her chair. 
“You don’t know what you are talking about! I am 
not ‘ punishing’ him; that’s the last thing I was thinking 
of. If there’s any ‘punishing’ going on. I’m the one 
that’s getting it. Listen, Elizabeth, and I’ll try to ex- 
310 


THE IRON WOMAN 


plain—you look as if you had some sense, so maybe you 
can understand, Nannie couldn’t; she has no brains. 
And Blair wouldn’t—I guess he has no heart. But this 
is how it is: Blair has always been a loafer—that’s v/hy 
he behaved as he did to you. Satan finds some mischief 
still, you know! So I’m cutting off his allowance, now, 
and leaving him practically penniless in my will, to stop 
his loafing. To make him work! He’ll have to work, 
to keep from starving; and work will make a man of him. 
As for you, you’ve done an abominable thing, Elizabeth; 
but it’s done! Now, turn to, and pay for your whistle: 
do your duty! Use your influence to induce Blair to 
work. That’s the best way to make up for the injury 
you’ve done him. As for the injury he’s done you, I 
hope the Lord will send you some children to make up 
for that. Now, my—my dear, clear out! clear out! I’ve 
got my work to do.” 

Elizabeth went back to Nannie’s parlor, stinging under 
her mother-in-law’s candor. That she was able to feel it 
showed that her apathy was wearing off. At any rate, 
the thought of the “injury” she had done Blair, which 
she took to be the loss of fortune, strengthened her some¬ 
times wavering resolution to stay with him. She did not 
tell him of this interview, or of its effect upon her, but she 
told her uncle—part of it. She went to him that night, 
and sitting down on a hassock at his feet, her head 
against his knee, she told him how Blair was to be pun¬ 
ished for her crime—she called it a crime. Then, in a 
low voice, she told him, as well as she could, just how 
the crime had been committed. 

“ I guessed how it was,” he said. And they were silent 
for a while. Then he broke out, huskily: “I don’t care 
a hang about Blair or his mother’s will. He deserves all 
he gets—or won’t get, rather! But, Elizabeth, if—if you 
want to be free—” 

“ Uncle Robert, what I want isn’t of any importance 
any more.” 

311 


THE IRON WOMAN 


" I talked it over as a supposititious case with Howe 
the other day, and he said that if Blair would agree, 
possibly—mind you, only possibly ;—a divorce could be 
arranged.” 

She sunk her head in her hands; then answered in a 
whisper: “Uncle, I did it. I ve got to see it through.” 

After a minute’s silence he put his hand on her soft 
hair. “Bully for you, Elizabeth,” he said, brokenly. 
Then, to escape from the emotional demand of the mo¬ 
ment, he began to bark: “You are outrageously care¬ 
less about money. How on earth a girl, who has been 
brought up by a man, and so might be expected to have 
some sense in such matters, can be so careless, I don’t 
understand! You’ve never asked me about that legacy. 
I’ve put the money in the bank. Your bank-book is 
there on my table.” 

Elizabeth was silent. That money! Oh, how could 
she ever touch it ? But in view of Mrs. Maitland’s de¬ 
cision it was perfectly obvious that ultimately she would 
have to touch it. “Blair can live on it,” she thought— 
it was a relief to her to stab herself with words ;—'' Blaii 
‘ can live on it for two years.’ ” 


CHAPTER XXVII 


Of course, after a while, as time passed, all the people 
who had been caught in the storm the two reckless 
creatures had let loose, shook down again into their 
grooves, and the routine of living went on. There are 
few experiences more bewildering to the unhappy human 
heart than this of discovering that things do go on. 
Innumerable details of the unimportant flood in and fill 
up the cracks and breaches that grief has made in the 
structure of life; we continue to live, and even to find 
life desirable! 

Miss White had been the first to realize this; her love 
for Elizabeth, being really (poor old maid!) maternal, was 
independent of respect, so almost the next day she had 
been able to settle down with complete happiness into 
the old habit of loving. Blair’s mother was the next to 
get into the comfortable track of routine; the very day 
after she came back from that trip to Philadelphia she 
plunged into business. She did, however, pause long 
enough to tell her superintendent how she was going to 
“even things up with David.” 

“ I am going to give him a lot of money for a hospital,” 
she said. “I’m not going to leave it to him; I’m only 
sixty-two, and I don’t propose to die yet awhile. When 
I do Blair will probably contest the will. He can’t break 
it. It’s cast-iron. But I don’t want David to wait until 
I’m dead and gone, and Blair has given up trying to 
break my will, and the estate is settled. I’m going to 
give it to him before I die. In a year or two, maybe. 
I’m realizing on securities now—why don’t I give him 

313 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the securities? My dear sir, what does a doctor know 
about securities ? Doctors have no more financial sense 
than parsons—at least, not much more,” she added, 
with relenting justice. “No; David is to have his 
money, snug in the bank—that new bank, on Federal 
Street. I told the president I was rolling up a nest-egg 
for somebody—I could see he thought it was for Blair! 
I didn’t enlighten him, because I don’t want the thing 
talked about. When I get the amount I want. I’ll hand 
Master David a bank certificate of deposit, and with all 
his airs about accepting money, he won’t be able to help 
himself! He’ll have to build his hospital, and draw his 
wages. It will make him independent of his outside 
customers, you see. Yes, I guess I can whip the devil 
round the stump as well as the next person!” she said, 
bridling with satisfaction. So, with an interest and a 
hope, Sarah Maitland, like Miss White, found life worth 
living. 

With David’s mother the occupation of trying to help 
David made living desirable. It also made her a little 
more remote from other people’s interests. Poor Robert 
Ferguson discovered this to his cost: it had occurred to 
him that now, when they were all so miserable, she might 
perhaps “be willing.” But she was not. When, a day 
or two after he had gone to see Elizabeth, he went to 
Philadelphia, Mrs. Richie was tremulously glad to see 
him, so that she might pour out her fears about David 
and ask advice on this point and that. “Being a man, 
you understand better than I do,” she acknowledged 
meekly; then broke down and cried for her boy’s pain. 
And when the kind, barking old friend, himself blinking 
behind misty spectacles, said, “Oh, now, my dear, don't 
cry,” she was so comforted that she cried some more, 
and for a single minute found her head most unex¬ 
pectedly on his shoulder. But all the same, she was 
not “ willing.” 

“Don’t ask me, dear Mr. Ferguson,” she said, wiping 
314 


THE IRON WOMAN 


her eyes. “We are such good friends, and Fm so fond 
of you, don’t let’s spoil it all.’’ 

“I believe you are fond of me,” he said, “and that is 
why it’s so unreasonable in you not to marry me. I 
don’t ask—impossibilities. But you do like me; and 
I love you, you dear, good, foolish woman;—so good 
that you couldn’t see badness when it lived next door 
to you!” 

“Don’t be so hard on people who do wrong,” she 
pleaded; “you make me afraid of you when you are so 
hard.” 

“I’m not hard; Elizabeth is her mother’s daughter; 
that’s all.” 

“Oh!” she cried, with sudden passion, “that poor 
mother! Can ’t you forgive her ? ’ ’ 

“No,” he said; “I can’t.” 

“You ought to forgive Elizabeth, at any rate,” she 
insisted, faintly; “and you ought to go and see her.” 

“Have you forgiven her?” he parried. 

She hesitated. “I think I have. I’ve tried to; but 
I don’t understand her. I can understand doing some¬ 
thing—wicked, for love; but not for hate.” 

He gave his meager laugh. “If forgiveness was a 
question of understanding. I’m afraid you’d be as hard 
on her mother as I am.” 

“On the contrary,” she said, vehemently, “if I forgive 
Elizabeth, it is for her mother’s sake.” Then she broke 
out, almost with tears: “Oh, how can you be so unkind 
as not to go and see the child? The time we need our 
friends most is when we have done wrong!” 

He was silent. 

“Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes I wish you would 
do something wrong yourself, just to learn to be piti¬ 
ful!” 

“You wish I would do wrong? I’m always doing 
wrong! I did wrong when I growled so. But—” he 
paused; “I believe I have seen Elizabeth,” he said 

315 


THE IRON WOMAN 


sheepishly; I believe we kissed and made up.” 
which even poor, sad Helena laughed. 

But these two old friends discovered, just as Miss 
White and Blair’s mother had discovered, that life was 
not over for them, because the habit of friendship per¬ 
sisted. And by and by, nearly a year later, David— 
even David! began to find a reason for living, in his 
profession. The old, ardent interest which used to 
make his eyes dim with pity, or his heart leap with joy 
at giving help, was gone; he no longer cared to cuddle 
the babies he might help to bring into the world; and a 
death-bed was an irritating failure rather than any more 
human emotion. So far as other people’s hopes and 
fears went, he was bitter or else callous, but he began 
to forget his humiliation, and he lost his self-conscious¬ 
ness in the serious purpose of success. He did not talk 
to his mother of the catastrophe of his life; but he did 
talk of other things, and with the old friendly intimacy. 
She was his only intimate friend. 

Thus, gradually, the little world that loved Elizabeth 
and Blair fell back, after the storm of pain and mortifi¬ 
cation, into the merciful commonplace of habit and 
of duty to be done. 

But for Elizabeth and Blair there was no going back; 
they had indeed fired the Ephesian dome! The past 
now, to Elizabeth, meant David’s message,—^to which, 
finally, she had been able to listen: “Tell her I under¬ 
stand; ask her to forgive me.” In Blair’s past there 
was nothing real to which he could return; for him the 
regality of life had begun with Love; and notwithstand¬ 
ing the bite of shame, the battle with his sense of chivalry, 
that revolted (now and then) at the thought of holding 
an unwilling woman as his wife, and the constant dull 
ache of jealousy, he had madly happy moments that 
first year of his marriage. Elizabeth was his! That 
was enough for him. His circumstances, which would 
have caused most men a good deal of anxiety, were, 
316 


THE IRON WOMAN 


thanks to his irresponsibility, very little in his thoughtc 
There was still a balance at his bank which made it 
possible, without encroaching on Elizabeth’s capital— 
which he swore he would not do—to live at the old 
River House “fairly decently.” He was, however, 
troubled because he could not propitiate Elizabeth 
with expensive gifts; and almost immediately after that 
interview with his mother, he began to think about an 
occupation, merely that he might have more money to 
spend on his wife. “If I could only buy her some 
jewels!” he used to say to himself, with a worried look. 
“I want to get you everything you want, my darling,” 
he told her once. 

She made no answer; and he burst out in sudden 
angry pain: “ You don’t care what I do!” Still she did 
not speak. “You—you are thinking of him still,” he 
said between set teeth. This constant corroding thought 
did not often break through his studied purpose to v/in 
her by his passionately considerate tenderness; when it 
did, it always ended in bitterness for him. 

“Of course I am thinking of him,” she would say, 
dully; “ I never stop thinking of him.” 

“I believe you would go back to him now!” he flung 
at her 

“Go back to him? I would go back to him on my 
hands and knees if he would take me.” 

Words like that left him speechless with misery; and 
yet he was happy—she was his wife! 

When his bank account began to dwindle, he found 
it easy to borrow; the fact that he was the son of his 
mother (and consequently his bills had always been 
paid) was sufficient collateral. That he borrowed at a 
ruinous interest was a matter of indifference to a man 
who, having never earned a dollar, had not the slightest 
idea of the value of a dollar. At the end of the first year 
of his marriage, jewels for Elizabeth seemed less impor¬ 
tant to him than her bread and butter; and it was then 

317 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that with real anxiety he tried to find something to do. 
Again “Sarah Maitland’s son” found doors open to him 
which the ordinary man, inexperienced and notoriously 
idle, would have found closed; but none of them offered 
what he thought a sufficient salary; and by and by he 
realized that very soon he would be obliged, as he ex¬ 
pressed it, “to sponge on Elizabeth”; for, reckless as he 
was, he knew that his borrowing capacity must come to 
an end. When the “sponging” finally began, he was 
acutely uncomfortable, which was certainly to his credit. 
At any rate, it proved that he was enough of a man to be 
miserable under such conditions. JfWhen a husband 
who is young and vigorous lives idly on his wife’s money 
one of two things happens: he is miserable, or he de¬ 
generates into contentment, f Blair was not degener¬ 
ating—consequently he was honestly wretched. 

His attempts to find something to do were not without 
humor to his mother, who kept herself informed, of 
course, of all his “business” ventures. “What! he 
wants the Dalzells to take him on ? What for ? Errand- 
boy? That’s all he’s good for. But I’m afraid two 
dollars and a half a week won’t buy him many china 
beetles!” When Blair essayed a broker’s office she 
even made an ancient joke to her superintendent: “If 
Blair could buy himself for what he is worth to Haines, 
and sell himself for what he thinks he’s worth, he might 
make a fair profit,—and pick up some more old masters.” 

But she was impatient for him to get through with all 
this nonsense of dilly-dallying at making a living by 
doing things he knew nothing about! How soon would 
he get down to hard-pan and knock at her door at the 
Works and ask for a job, man-fashion? “That’s what 
I want to know!” she used to tell Mr. Ferguson, who was 
silent. He did not want to know anything about Blair; 
all he cared for was to help his girl bear the burden of her 
folly. He called it “folly” now, and Miss White used to 
nod her old head in melancholy agreement. It was only 
318 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to Robert Ferguson that Mrs. Maitland betrayed her con¬ 
stant anxiety about her son; and it was that anxiety 
which made her keenly sensitive to Elizabeth’s deepen¬ 
ing depression. For as the excitement of sacrifice and 
punishment wore off, and the strain of every-day living 
began to tell, Elizabeth’s depression was very marked. 
She was never angry now—she had not the energy for 
anger; and she was never unkind to Blair; perhaps 
her own pain made her pitiful of his. But she was al¬ 
ways, as Cherry-pie expressed it, “under a cloud.” Mrs. 
Maitland, watching her, wondered if she was moody 
because funds were getting low. How intensely she 
hoped that was the reason! “I reckon that money of 
hers is coming to an end,” she used to think, trium¬ 
phantly—for she had known, through Nannie, just when 
Blair had reached the point at which he had been obliged 
to use his wife’s capital. Whenever she saw Elizabeth— 
who for want of anything better to do came constantly 
to see Nannie; she would drop a word or two which she 
thought might go back to her son: “We need an extra 
hand in the office.” Or: “How would Blair like to travel 
for the Works? We can always take on a traveling 
man.” 

She never had the chance to drop her hints to Blair 
himself. In vain Nannie urged upon her brother her 
old plea: “Be nice to Mamma. Do come and see her. 
Everything will be all right again if you will only come 
and see her!” Nothing moved him. If his mother 
could be firm, so could he; he was never more distinctly 
her son than in his obstinacy. 

“If she alters her will,” he said, briefly, “I will alter 
my behavior. She’s not my mother so long as she casts 
off her son.” 

Mrs. Maitland seemed to age very much that second 
year. Her business was still a furious interest; she 
stormed her way through every trade obstacle, occa¬ 
sionally bargaining with her conscience by increasing 

21 319 


THE IRON WOMAN 


her donations to foreign missions; but there was this 
change of suddenly apparent age. Instead of the old, 
clear-eyed, ruthless joy in work, there was a look of 
furtive waiting; an anxiety of hope deferred, that 
grooved itself into her face. And somewhere in the 
spring of the third year, the hoped-for moment ap¬ 
proached—necessity began to offer its beneficent oppor¬ 
tunity to her son. In spite of experiments in prudence 
in borrowing and in earning, the end of Elizabeth’s 
money was in sight. When the end was reached, there 
would be nothing for Blair Maitland but surrender. 

“Shall I cave in now.^” he vacillated; he was wan¬ 
dering off alone across the bridge, fairly aching with 
indecision, and brooding miserably, not only over the 
situation, but over his helplessness to buy his way into 
Elizabeth’s affections. “She ought to have a carriage; 
it is preposterous for my wife to be going round in street¬ 
cars. If I could give her a carriage and a pair of 
horses!” But of course it was ridiculous to think of 
things like that. He could not buy a carriage for 
Elizabeth out of her own money—besides, her money 
was shrinking alarmingly. It was this passionate de¬ 
sire to propitiate her, as well as the recognition of ap¬ 
proaching necessities, that brought him to the point 
where he saw capitulation ahead of him. “I wish I 
could ma :e up my mind,” he thought, wearily. “Well, 
if I don’t get som_ething to do pretty soon, it will be 
made up for me,—I’ll have to eat crow! I’ll have to go 
to the Works and ask for a job. But I swear I won’t 
speak to— her! It is damnable to have to cave in; I’d 
starve before I’d do it, if it wasn’t for Elizabeth.” 

But before the time for eating crow arrived^ some¬ 
thing happened. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 


Mrs. Maitland and Nannie were having their supper 
at the big, cluttered office table in the shabby dining¬ 
room—shabbier now by twenty years than when Blair 
first expressed his opinion of it. In the midst of the 
silent meal Sarah Maitland’s eye fell on her stepdaughter, 
and hardened into attention. Nannie looked pale, she 
thought; and frowned slightly. It occurred to her that 
the girl might be lonely in the long evenings over there 
in the parlor, with nothing to do but read foolish little 
stories, or draw foolish little pictures, or embroider 
foolish little tidies and things. “What a life!” she said 
to herself; it was a shame Blair did not come in and 
cheer his sister up. Yes; Nannie was certainly very 
solitary. What a pity David Richie had no sense! 
“ Now that he can’t get Elizabeth, nothing could be more 
sensible,” she said to herself; then sighed. Young men 
were never very sensible in regard to matrimony. “I 
suppose I ought to do something myself to cheer her up,” 
she thought,—a little impatiently, for really it was rather 
absurd to expect a person of her quality to cheer Nannie! 
Still, she might talk to her. Of course they had only 
one topic in common: 

“Seen your brother lately?” 

“No,Mamma. He went East day before yesterday.” 

“Has he found anything to do?” This was the usual 
weary question; Nannie gave the usual scared answer: 

“I think not; not yet. He is going to look up some¬ 
thing in New York, Elizabeth says.” 

“Tell Elizabeth I will take him on at the Works^ 
321 


THE IRON WOMAN 


whenever he is ready to come. His belly will bring him 
to it yet!” she ended, with the old, hopeful belief that 
has comforted parents ever since the fatted calf proved 
the correctness of the expectation. Nannie sighed. Mrs. 
Maitland realized that she was not “cheering” her very 
much. “You ought to amuse yourself,” she said, 
severely; “how do you amuse yourself?” 

“I—draw,” Nannie managed to say; she really could 
not think of any other amusement. 

Then her stepmother had an inspiration: “Would 
you like to come over to the furnace and see the night 
cast ? It’s quite a sight, people say.” 

Nannie was dumfounded at the attention. Mamma 
offering to take her to the Works I To be sure, it was the 
last thing on earth she would choose to do, but if her 
stepmother asked her, of course she could not say no. 
She said “ yes,” reluctantly enough, but Mrs. Maitland did 
not detect the reluctance; she was too pleased with 
herself at having thought of some way of entertaining 
the girl. 

“Get your bonnet on, get your bonnet on!” she com¬ 
manded, in high good humor. And Nannie, quailing 
at the thought of the Works at night—“it’s dreadful 
enough in the daytime,” she said to herself—put on her 
hat, in trembling obedience. “Yes,” Mrs. Maitland 
said, as she tramped down the cinder path toward the 
mills, Nannie almost running at her heels—“yes, the 
cast is a pretty sight, people say. Your brother once 
said that it ought to be painted. Well, I suppose there 
are people who care for pictures,” she said, incredulously. 
“I know I’m $5,000 out of pocket on account of a pic¬ 
ture,” she ended, with a grim chuckle. 

As they were crossing the Yards, the cavernous glooms 
of the Works, under the vast stretch of their sheet-iron 
roofs, were lighted for dazzling moments by the glow of 
molten metal and the sputtering roar of flames from the 
stacks; a network of narrow-gauge tracks spread about 
322 


THE IRON WOMAN 


them, and the noises from the mills were deafening. 
Nannie clutched nervously at Mrs. Maitland’s arm, and 
her stepmother grunted with amusement. “Hold on to 
me,” she shouted—she had to shout to make herself 
heard; “there’s nothing to hurt you. Why, I could 
walk around here with my eyes shut!” 

Nannie clung to her frantically; if she protested, the 
soft flutter of her voice did not reach Mrs. Maitland’s 
ears. A few steps farther brought them into the com¬ 
parative silence of the cast-house of the furnace, and 
here they paused while Sarah Maitland spoke to one of 
the keepers. Only the furnace itself was roofed; beyond 
it the stretch of molded sand was arched by the serene 
and starlit night. 

“That’s the pig bed out there,” Mrs. Maitland ex¬ 
plained, kindly; “see, Nannie? Those cross-trenches in 
the sand they call sows; the little hollows on the side are 
the pigs. When they tap the furnace, the melted iron 
will flow down into ’em; understand?” 

“Mamma, I’d—I’d like to go home,” poor Nannie 
managed to say; “it scares me I ’ ’ 

Mrs. Maitland looked at her in astonishment. “ Scares 
you ? What scares you ?” 

“It’s so—dreadful,” Nannie gasped. 

“You don’t suppose I’d bring you anywhere where 
you could get hurt ?” her stepmother said, incredulously. 
She was astonished to the point of being pained. How 
could Herbert’s girl be such a fool? She remembered 
that Blair used to call his sister the “ ’fraid-cat.” “ Good 
name,” she thought, contemptuously. She made no 
allowance for the effect of this scene of night and Are, 
of stupendous shadows and crashing noises, upon a little 
bleached personality, which for all these years, had lived 
in the shadow of a nature so dominant and aggressive 
that, quite unconsciously, it sucked the color and the 
character out of any temperament feebler than itself. 
Sarah Maitland frowned, and said roughly, “ Oh, you can 

323 


THE IRON WOMAN 


go home, if you want to; Mr. Parks!” she called to the 
foreman; “ just walk back to the house, if you please, with 
my daughter;” then she turned on her heel and went up 
to the furnace. 

Nannie, clutching Parks’s hand, stumbled out into the 
darkness. “It’s perfectly awful!” she confided to the 
good-natured man, when he left her at her back door. 

“Oh, you get used to it,” he said, kindly. “You’d ’a 
knowed,” he told one of his workmen afterward, “that 
there wasn’t hide nor hair of her that belonged to the 
Old One. A slip of a thing, and scared to death of the 
noise.” 

The “Old One,” after Nannie had gone, poked about 
for a moment or two,—“she noses into things, to save 
two cents,” her men used to say, with reluctant admira¬ 
tion of the ruthless shrewdness that was instant to detect 
their shortcomings; then she went down the slight in¬ 
cline from the furnace hearth to the open stretch of 
molding-sand; there was a pile of rusty scrap at one 
side, and here, in the soft April darkness under the stars, 
she seated herself, looking absently at the furnace and 
the black, gnome-like figures of the helpers. She was 
thinking just what Parks had thought, that Nannie had 
none of her blood in her. “Afraid!” said Sarah Mait¬ 
land. Well, Blair had never been afraid, she would say 
that for him; he was a fool, and pig-headed, and a 
loafer; but he wasn’t a coward. He had even thought 
it fine, that scene of power, where civilization made itself 
before his very, eyes! When would he think it fine 
enough to come in and go to work ? Come in, and take 
his part in making civilization? Then she noticed the 
bending figure of the keeper opening the notch of the 
furnace; instantly there was a roar of sparks, and a 
blinding white gush of molten iron flowing like water 
down into the sand runner. The sudden, fierce illumi¬ 
nation drowned the stars overhead, and brought into 
clear relief her own figure, sitting there on the pile of 

324 


THE IRON WOMAN 

scrap watching the flowing iron. Tiny blue flames of 
escaping gas danced and shimmered on its ineffable 
rippling brightness, that cooled from dazzling snow to 
rose, then to crimson, and out in the sand, to glowing 
gray. Blair had called it “beautiful.” Well, it was a 
pretty sight! She wished she had told him that she 
herself thought it pretty; but the fact was, it had never 
struck her before. “I suppose I don’t notice pretty 
things very much,” she thought, in some surprise. 
“Well, I’ve never had time for foolishness. Too busy 
making money for Blair.” She sighed; after all, he 
wasn’t going to have the money. She had been heaping 
up riches, and had not known who should gather them. 
She had been too busy to see pretty things. And why ? 
That orphan asylums and reformatories—and David 
Richie’s hospital—should have a few extra thousands! 
A month ago the fund she was making for David had 
reached the limit she had set for it, and only to-day she 
had brought the bank certificate of deposit home with 
her. She had felt a little glow of satisfaction when she 
locked it into the safe in her desk; she liked the con¬ 
sciousness of a good job finished. She was going to sum¬ 
mon the youngster to Mercer, and tell him how he was 
to administer the fund; and if he put on any of his airs 
and graces about accepting money, she would shut him 
up mighty quick! “I’ll write him to-morrow, if I’ve 
time,” she had said. At the moment, the sense of 
achievement had exhilarated her; yet now, as she sat 
there on the heap of scrap, bending a pliant boring be¬ 
tween her fingers, her pillar of fire roaring overhead from 
the chimneys of the furnaces, the achievement seemed 
flat enough. Why should she, to build a hospital for an¬ 
other woman’s son, have worked so hard that she had 
never had time to notice the things her own son called 
“pretty”? Not his china beetles, of course, or truck 
like that; but the shimmering flow of her iron,—or even 
that picture, for which she was out of pocket $5,000. 

325 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I can see you might call it pretty, if it hadn't cost so 
much," she admitted. Yes, she had worked, she told 
herself, “as hard as a man," to earn money for Blair!— 
only to make him idle and to have him say that thing 
about her clothes which Goose Molly had said before he 
was bom. ‘ Wonder if I’ve been a fool? she ruminated. 

It was at that moment that she noticed, at one side 
of the furnace, between two bricks of the hearth, a little 
puff of white vapor; instantly she leaped, shouting, to 
her feet. But it was too late. The molten iron, seeping 
down through some crack in the furnace, creeping, creep¬ 
ing, beneath the bricks of the pavement, had reached 
some moisture. . . . The explosion, the clouds of scald¬ 
ing steam, the terror of the flowing, scattering fire, 
drowned her voice and hid her frantic gestures of warn¬ 
ing. . . . 

“Killed?" she said, furiously, as some one helped her 
up from the scrap-heap against which she had been 
hurled; “of course not! I don’t get killed." Then 
suddenly the appalling confusion was dominated by her 
voice: 

''Look after those men^ 

She stood there in the center of the horror, reeling a 
little once or twice, holding her skirt up over her left 
arm, and shouting her quick orders. “Hurt?" she said 
again to a questioning helper. “I don’t know. I 
haven’t time to find out. That man there is alive! Get 
a doctor!" She did not leave the Works until two badly 
burned men had been carried away, and two dead bod¬ 
ies lifted out of the reek of steam and the spatter of 
half-chilled metal. Then, still holding her skirt over 
her arm, she went alone, in the darkness, up the path to 
her back door. 

“No! I don’t want anybody to go home with me," 
she said, angrily; “look after things here. Notify Mr. 
Ferguson. I’ll come back." When she banged open 
her own door, she had only one question; “Is—Nannie 
326 


THE IRON WOMAN 


—all—right?” Harris, gaping with dismay, and stam¬ 
mering, “My goodness! yes’m; yes’m!” followed her to 
the dining-room, where she crashed down like a felled 
tree, and lay unconscious on the floor. 

When she began to come to herself, a doctor, for whom 
Harris had fled, was binding up her tom arm, which, 
covered with blood, and black with grit and rust, was 
an ugly sight. “Where’s Blair?” she said, thickly; then 
came entirely to her senses, and demanded, sharply, 
“Nannie all right?” Reassured again on this point, she 
looked frowningly at the doctor. “Come, hurry! I 
want to get back to the Works.” 

“Back to the Works! To-night? Impossible! You 
mustn’t think of such a thing,” the young man protested. 
Mrs. Maitland looked at him, and he shifted from one 
foot to the other. “It—^it won’t do, really,” he said, 
weakly; “that was a pretty bad knock you got on the 
back of your head, and your arm—” 

“Young man,” she said, “you patch this up, quick. 
I’ve got to see to my men. That’s my business. You 
’tend to yours.” 

“But my business is to keep you here,” he told her, 
essaying to be humorous. His humor went out like a 
little candle in the wind: “Your business is to put on 
bandgages. That’s all I pay you for.” 

And the doctor put on bandages with expedition. In 
the front hall he spoke to Nannie. “Your mother has 
a very bad arm. Miss Maitland; and that violent blow on 
her head may have done damage. I can’t tell yet. You 
must make her keep still.” 

*'Make! —Mamma?” said Nannie. 

“She says she’s going over to the Works,” said the 
doctor, shrugging his shoulders; “when she comes home, 
get her to bed as quickly as you can. I’ll come in and 
see her in the morning, if she wants me. But if she 
won’t do what I say about keeping quiet. I’d rather you 
called in other advice.” 


327 


THE IRON WOMAN 


When Nannie tried to “make Mamma” keep still, the 
only reply she received was: “You showed your sense 
in going home, my dear!” And off she went, Harris, at 
Nannie’s instigation, lurking along behind her. “If 
Herbert’s girl had been hurt!” she said, aloud, staggering 
a little as she walked, “my God, what would I have 
done?” 

Afterward, they said it was astounding that she had 
been able to go back to the Works that night. She must 
have been in very intense pain. When she came home, 
the pain conquered to the extent of sending her, at mid¬ 
night, up to her stepdaughter’s room; she was red with 
fever, and her eyes were glassy. “Got any laudanum, 
or stuff of that kind ?” she demanded. And yet the next 
day, when the bandages had been changed and there was 
some slight relief, she persisted in going to the Works 
again. But the third day she gave up, and attended to 
her business in the dining-room. 

“If only Blair would come home,” Nannie said, “I 
think, perhaps, she would be nice to him. Haven’t you 
any idea where he is, Elizabeth?” 

“Not the slightest,” Elizabeth said, indifferently. 
She herself came every day, and performed what small 
personal services Mrs. Maitland would permit. Nannie 
did not amount to much as a nurse, but she was really 
helpful in writing letters, signing them so exactly in 
Sarah Maitland’s hand that her stepmother was greatly 
diverted at her proficiency. “I shall have to look after 
my check-book,” she said, with a chuckle. 

It was not until a week later that they began to be 
alarmed. It was Harris who first discovered the serious¬ 
ness of her condition; when he did, the knowledge came 
like a blow to her household and her office. It was late 
in the afternoon. Earlier in the day she had had a vio¬ 
lent chill, during which she sat crouching and cowering 
over the dining-room fire, refusing to go to bed, and in a 
temper that scared Nannie and Harris almost to death. 
328 


THE IRON WOMAN 


When the chill ceased, she went, flushed with fever, to 
her own room, saying she was “all right,” and banging 
the door behind her. At about six, when Harris knocked 
to say that supper was ready, she came out, holding the 
old German cologne bottle in her hand. ''He gave me 
that,” she said, and fondled the bottle against her cheek; 
then, suddenly she pushed it into Harris's face. “Kiss 
it!” she commanded, and giggled shrilly. 

Harris jumped back with a screech. "Gor!” he said; 
and his knees hit together. The slender green bottle 
fell smashing to the floor. Mrs. Maitland started, and 
caught her breath; her mind cleared instantly. 

“Clean up that mess. The smell of the cologne takes 
my breath away. I—I didn’t know I had it in my hand.” 

That night Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter into 
space, telling Blair that his mother was seriously ill, and 
he really ought to be at home. But he had left the hotel 
to which she sent it, without giving any address, so it 
lay in a dusty pigeonhole awaiting his return a week 
later. 

The delirium came again the next day; then Sarah 
Maitland cried, because, she said, Nannie had hidden the 
Noah’s ark; “and Blair and I want to play with it,” she 
whined. But a moment afterward she looked at her 
stepdaughter with kind eyes, and said, as she had said a 
dozen times in the last ten days, “ Lucky you went home 
that night, my dear.” 

Of course by this time the alarm was general. The 
young doctor was supported, at Robert Ferguson’s in¬ 
sistence, by an old doctor, who, if he was awed by his 
patient, at least did not show it. He was even coura¬ 
geous enough to bring a nurse along with him. 

“Miss Baker will spare your daughter,” he said, sooth¬ 
ingly, when Sarah Maitland, seeing the strange figure in 
her bedroom, had declared she wouldn’t have a fussing 
woman about. “Miss Nannie needs help,” the doctor 
said. Mrs. Maitland frowned, and yielded. 

329 


THE IRON WOMAN 


But the nurse did not have a good time. In her stiffly 
starched skirt, with her little cap perched on her head, 
she went fluttering prettily about, watched all the while 
by the somber, half-shut eyes. She moved the furniture, 
she dusted the bureau, she arranged the little row of 
photographs; and then she essayed to smooth Mrs. 
Maitland’s hair—^it was the last straw. The big, gray 
head began to lift slowly, a trembling finger pointed at 
the girl; there was only one word : 

^^Stopr 

The startled nurse stopped,—so abruptly that she 
almost lost her balance. 

“Clear out. You can sit in the hall. When I want 
you. I’ll let you know.” 

Miss Baker fled, and Mrs. Maitland apparently forgot 
her. When the doctor came, however, she roused her¬ 
self to say: “ I won’t- have that fool girl buzzing round. 
I don’t like all this highfalootin’ business of nurses, any¬ 
how. They are nothing but foolish expense.” Perhaps 
that last word stirred some memory, for she added 
abruptly: “Nannie, bring me that—^that picture you 
have in the parlor. The Virgin Mary, you know. Rags 
of popery, but I want to look at it. No; I can’t pay 
$5,000 for 14 X 18 inches of old master, and hire nurses 
to curl my hair, too!” But nobody smiled at her 
joke. 

When Nannie brought the picture, she bade her put it 
on a chair by the bedside, and sometimes the two girls 
saw her look at it intently. “ I think she likes the child,” 
Elizabeth said, in a low voice; but Nannie sighed, and 
said, “No; she is provoked because Blair was extrav¬ 
agant.” After Miss Baker’s banishment, Elizabeth did 
most of the waiting on her, for Nannie’s anxious tim¬ 
idity made her awkward to the point of being, as Mrs. 
Maitland expressed it, wearily, “more bother than she 
was worth.” Once she asked where Blair was, and 
Elizabeth said that nobody knew. “He heard of some 

330 


THE IRON WOMAN 


business opening, Mrs Maitland, and went East to see 
about it.” 

‘‘Went East? What did he go East for? He’s got a 
business opening at home, right under his nose,” she said, 
thickly. 

After that she did not ask for him. But from her bed 
in her own room she could see the dining-room door, 
and she lay there watching it, with expectation smol¬ 
dering in her half-shut eyes. Once, furtively, when no 
one was looking, she lifted the hem of the sheet with her 
fumbling right hand and wiped her eyes. For the next 
few days she gained, and lost, and gained again. There 
were recurrent periods of lucidity, followed by the terri¬ 
ble childishness that had been the first indication of her 
condition. At the end of the next week she suddenly 
said, in a loud voice, ‘‘ I won’t .stay in bed!” And despite 
Nannie’s pleadings, and Miss Baker’s agitated flutter- 
ings, she got up, and shuffled into the dining-room; she 
stood there, clutching with her uninjured hand a gray 
blanket that was huddled around her shoulders. Her 
hair was hanging in limp, disordered locks about her 
face, which had fallen away to the point of emaciation. 
She was leaning against the table, her knees shaking 
with weakness. But it was evident that her mind was 
quite clear. “Bed is a place to die in,” she said; “I’m 
well. Let me alone. I shall stay here.” She managed 
to get over to her desk, and sank into the revolving chair 
with a sigh of relief. “Ah!” she said, “I’m getting out 
of the woods. Harris! Bring me something to eat.” 
But when the food was put before her, she could not 
touch it. 

Robert Ferguson, who almost lived at the Maitland 
house that week, told her, soothingly, that she really 
ought to go back to bed, at which she laughed with rough 
goodnature. “ Don’t talk baby-talk. I’m getting well. 
But I’ve been sick; I’ve had a scare; so I’m going to 
write a letter, in case— Or here, you write it for me.” 

331 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ To Blair ?” he said, as he took his pen out of his pocket. 

“Blair? No! To David Richie about that money. 
Don’t you remember I told you I was going to give him 
a lot of money for a hospital ? That I was going to get 
a certificate of deposit”—her voice wavered and she 
seemed to doze. A moment later, when her mind 
cleared again, her superintendent said, with some effort: 
“Aren’t you going to do something for Blair? You will 
get well. I’m sure, but—in case— Your will isn’t fair 
to the boy; you ought to do something for him.” 

Instantly she was alert: “ I have. I’ve done the best 
thing in the world for him; I’ve thrown him on his own 
legs 1 As for getting well, of course I’m going to get well. 
But if I didn’t, everything is closed up; my will’s made; 
Blair is sure of poverty. Well; I guess I won’t have 
you write to David to-day; I’m tired. When I’m out 
again, I’ll tell Howe to draw up a paper telling him just 
what the duties of a trustee are. . . . Why don’t you 
. . . why don’t you marry his mother, and be done with 
it ? I hate to see a man and woman shilly-shally.” 

“She won’t have me,” he said, good-naturedly; in his 
anxiety he was willing to let her talk of anything, merely 
to amuse her. 

“Well, she’s a nice woman,” Sarah Maitland said; 
“and a good woman; I was afraid you were doing the 
shilly-shallying. And any man who would hesitate to 
take her, isn’t fit to black her boots. Friend Ferguson, 
I have a contempt for a man who is more particular than 
his Creator.” Robert Ferguson wondered what she was 
driving at, but he would not bother her by a question. 

“What was that I used to say about her?” the sick 
woman ruminated, with closed eyes; “‘fair and— 
What was it? Forty? No, that wasn’t it.” 

“Fifty,” he suggested, smiling. 

She shook her head peevishly. “No, that wasn’t it. 
‘Fair, and, and’—what was it? It puts me out of pa¬ 
tience to forget things! ‘ Fair and— frail /’ That was it; 

332 


THE IRON WOMAN 


frail! ‘Fair and frail.’” She did not pause for her su¬ 
perintendent’s gasp of protest. “Yes; first time I saw 
her, I thought there was a nigger in the woodpile. She 
won’t marry you, friend Ferguson, because she has 
something on her conscience. Tell her I say not to be 
a fool. The best man going is none too good for her!” 

Robert Ferguson’s heart gave a violent plunge in his 
breast, but before his angry denial could reach her brain, 
her thought had wandered. “No! no! no! I won’t go 
to bed. Bed is where people die.” She got up from her 
chair, to walk about and show how well she was; but when 
she reached the center of the room she seemed to crumple 
up, sinking and sliding down on to the floor, her back 
against one of the carved legs of the table. Once there, 
she would not get up. She became so violently angry 
when they urged her to let them help her to her feet, 
that they were obliged to yield. “We will do more harm 
by irritating her,” the doctor said, “than any good we 
could accomplish by putting her back to bed forcibly.” 
So they put cushions behind her, and there she sat, star¬ 
ing with dim, expectant eyes at the dining-room door; 
sometimes speaking with stoical endurance, intelligently 
enough; sometimes, when delirious, whimpering with 
the pain of that terrible arm, swollen now to a monstrous 
mass of agony. 

Late in the afternoon she said she wanted to see “that 
picture”; and Elizabeth knelt beside her, holding the 
little dark canvas so that she could look at it; she sat 
staring into it for a long time. “Mary didn’t try to 
keep her baby from the cross,” she said, suddenly; 
“well, I’ve done better than that; I brought the cross 
to my baby.” Her face fell into wonderfully peaceful 
lines. Just at dusk she tried to sing. 

“ ‘ Drink to me only with thine eyes ’ ” 

she quavered; “my boy sings that beautifully. I must 
give him a present. A check. I must give him a check.*’ 
333 


THE IRON WOMAN 


But when Nannie said, eagerly, “ Blair has written Eliza¬ 
beth that he will be at home to-morrow; I’ll tell him 
you want to see him; and oh. Mamma, won’t you please 
be nice to him?”—she looked perfectly blank. Toward 
morning she sat silently for a whole hour sucking her 
thumb. When, abruptly, she came to herself and real¬ 
ized what she had been doing, the shamed color rose 
in her face. Nannie, kneeling at her side, caught at the 
flicker of intelligence to say, “ Mamma, would you like to 
see the Rev. Mr. Gore? He is here; waiting in the par¬ 
lor. Sha’n’t I bring him in ?” 

Mrs. Maitland frowned. “What does he come for 
now? I’m sick. I can’t see people. Besides, I sent 
him a check for Foreign Missions last month.” 

“Oh, Mamma!” Nannie said, brokenly, “he hasn’t 
come for money; I—I sent for him.” 

Sarah Maitland’s eyes suddenly opened; her mind 
cleared instantly. “Oh,” she said; and then, slowly: 
“Um-m; I see.” She seemed to meditate a moment; 
then she said, gravely: “No, my dear, no; I won’t see 
little Gore. He’s a good little man; a very good little 
man for missions and that sort of thing. But when it 
comes to this —” she paused; “I haven’t time to see 
to him,” she said, soberly. A minute later, noticing 
Nannie’s tears, she tried to cheer her: “Come, come.f^ 
don’t be troubled,” she said, smiling kindly, “I can 
paddle my own canoe, my dear.” After that she was 
herself for nearly half an hour. Once she said. “My 
house is in order, friend Ferguson.” Then she lost her¬ 
self again. To those who watched her, huddled on the 
heap of cushions, mumbling and whimpering, or with a 
jerk righting her mind into stony endurance, she seemed 
like a great tower falling and crumbling in upon itself. 
At that last dreadful touch of decay, when she put her 
thumb in her mouth like a baby, her stepdaughter 
nearly fainted. 

All that night the mists gathered, and thinned, and 
334 


THE IRON WOMAN 


gathered again. In the morning, still lying, on the 
floor, propped against all the pillows and cushions of 
the house, she suddenly looked with clear eyes at Nannie. 

“Why!” she said, in her own voice, and frowning 
sharply, “that certificate of deposit! I got it from the 
Bank the day of the accident, but I haven’t indorsed it! 
Lucky I’ve got it here in the house. Bring it to me. 
It’s in the safe in my desk. Take my keys.” 

Nannie, who for the moment was alone with her, found 
the key, and opening the little iron door in the desk, 
brought the certificate and a pen dipped in ink; but even 
in those few moments of preparation, the mist had begun 
to settle again: “I told the cashier it was a present I 
was going to make,” she chuckled to herself; “said he'd 
like to get a present like that. I reckon he would. 
Reckon anybody would.” Her voice lapsed into in¬ 
coherent murmurings, and Nannie had to speak to her 
twice before her eyes were intelligent again; then she 
took the pen and wrote, her lips faintly mumbling: 
“ Pay to the order of—what’s the date ?” she said, dully, 
her eyes almost shut. “Never mind; I don’t have to 
date it. But I was thinking: Blair gave me a calendar 
when he was a little boy. Blair—Blair—” And as she 
spoke his name, she wrote it: ''Blair Maitland." But 
just as she did so, her mind cleared, and she saw what 
she had written. “ Blair Maitland ?” she said, and smiled 
and shook her head. “Oh, I’ve written that name too 
many times. Too many times. Got the habit.” She 
lifted her pen heavily, perhaps to draw it through the 
name, but her hand sagged. 

“ Aren’t you going to sign it. Mamma ?” Nannie asked, 
breathlessly; and her stepmother turned faintly sur¬ 
prised eyes upon her. Nannie, kneeling beside her, urged 
again: “Mamma, you want to give it to Blair! Try, 
do try—” But she did not hear her. 

At noon that day, through the fogged and clogging 
senses, there was another outburst of the soul. They 

22 335 


THE IRON WOMAN 


had been trying to give her some medicine, and each 
time she had refused it, moving her head back and side- 
wise, and clenching her teeth against the spoon. Over 
and over the stimulant was urged and forced upon her; 
when suddenly her eyes flashed open and she looked at 
them with the old power that had made people obey her 
all her life. The mind had been insulted by its body 
beyond endurance; she lifted her big right hand and 
struck the spoon from the doctor’s fingers: “/ have the 
right to die.'' 

Then the flame fluttered down again into the ashes. 

When Blair reached the house that afternoon, she was 
unconscious. Once, at a stab of pain, she burst out 
crying with fretful wildness; and once she put her 
thumb into her mouth. 

At six o’clock that night she died. 


* 


CHAPTER XXIX 


When the doctor came to tell Nannie that Sarah Mait¬ 
land was dead, he found her in the parlor, shivering up 
against her brother. Blair had come to his mother’s 
house early that afternoon; a note from Elizabeth, await¬ 
ing him at the River House, had told him of the gravity 
of Mrs. Maitland’s condition, and bidden him “come in¬ 
stantly.” As he read it, his face grew tense. “ Of course 
I must go,” he said; but there was no softening in his 
eyes. In all these months, in which his mother’s de¬ 
termination had shown no weakening, his anger had 
deepened into the bitterest animosity. Yet curiously 
enough, though he hated her more, he disliked her 
less. Perhaps because he thought of her as a Force 
rather than as a mother; a power he was fighting— 
force against force! And the mere sense of the grapple 
gave him a feeling of equality with her which he had 
never had. Or it may have been merely that his eyes 
and ears did not suffer constant offense from her pecu¬ 
liarities. He had not forgotten the squalor of the pecu¬ 
liarities, but they did not strike him daily in the face, so 
hate was not made poignant by disgust. But neither 
was it lessened by the possibility of her death. 

“ I wonder if she has changed her will ?” he said to him¬ 
self, with fierce curiosity. But whether she had done so 
or not, propriety demanded his presence in her house if 
she were dying. As for anything more than propriety,— 
well, if by destroying her iniquitous will she had showed 
proper maternal affection, he would show proper filial 
solicitude. It struck him, as he stepped into a carriage 
337 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to drive down to Shantytown, that such an attitude of 
mind on his part was pathetic for them both. “She 
never cared for me,” he thought; and he knew he had 
never cared for her. Yes, it was pathetic; if he could 
have had for a mother such a woman as— he frowned; 
he would not name David Richie’s mother even in his 
thoughts. But if he could have had a gentle and gi^acious 
woman for a mother, how he would have loved her! He 
had always been motherless, he thought; it was not to¬ 
day which would make him so. Still, it was strangely 
shaking, this idea of her death. When Nannie came 
into the parlor to greet him, he was silent while she told 
him, shivering and crying, the story of the last two 
weeks. 

“She hasn’t been conscious since noon,” she ended, 
“but she may call for you; and oh, if shje doea. Blair, 
you will be lovely to her, won’t you?” 

His grave silence seemed an assent. 

“Will you go in and see her?” she said, weeping. 
But Blair, with the picture she had given him of that 
awful figure lying on the floor, shook his head. 

“I will wait here.—I could not bear to see it,” he 
added, shuddering. 

“Elizabeth is mth her,” Nannie said, “so I’ll stay a 
little while with you. I don’t believe it will be before 
morning.” 

Now and then they spoke in whispers; but for the 
most part they were silent, listening to certain sinister 
sounds that came from the room across the hall. 

It was a warm May twilight; above the gaunt outline 
of the foundry, the dim sickle of a young moon hung in a 
daffodil sky; the river, running black between banks of 
slag and cinders, caught the sheen of gold*and was trans¬ 
figured into glass mingled with fire. Through the open 
windows, the odor of white lilacs and the acrid sweetness 
of the blossoming plum-tree, floated into the room. The 
gas was not lighted; sometimes the pulsating flames, 
338 


THE IRON WOMAN 


roaring out sidewise from under the half-shut dampers 
of the great chimneys, lighted the dusk with a red glare, 
and showed Blair’s face set in new lines. He had never 
been so near the great Reality before; never been in a 
house where, on the threshold. Death was standing; his 
personal affairs, angers or anxieties, dropped out of his 
mind. ‘So sitting and listening and not speaking, the 
doctor found them. 

“She has gone,” he said, solemnly. Nannie began to 
cry; Blair stood up, then walked to the window and 
looked out at the Yards. Dead? For a moment the 
word had no meaning. Then, abruptly, the old, ele¬ 
mental meaning struck him like a blow; that meaning 
which the animal in us knows, before we know the ac¬ 
quired meanings which grief and faith have put into the 
word: his mother “was not.” It was incredible! He 
gasped as he stood at the window, looking out over the 
blossoming lilacs at the Works, black against a fading 
saffron sky. Ten minutes ago his mother was in the 
other room, owning those Works; now—? The sheer 
impossibility of imagining the cessation of such a person¬ 
ality filled him with an extraordinary dismay. He was 
conscious of a bewildered inability to believe what had 
been said to him. 

Mr. Ferguson, who had been with Sarah Maitland when 
the end came, followed the doctor into the parlor; but 
neither he nor Blair remembered personalities. They 
stood together now, listening to what the doctor was 
saying; Blair, still dazed and unbelieving, put his arm 
round Nannie and said, “Don’t cry, dear; Mr. Ferguson, 
tell her not to cry!” And the older man said, “Make her 
sit down, Blair; she looks a little white.” Both of them 
had forgotten individual resentments or embarrassments 

When some people die, it is as if a candle flame were 
gently blown out; but when, on the other side of the 
hall, this big woman lay dead on the floor, it seemed to 
the people who stood by as if the whole machinery of 
339 


THE IRON WOMAN 


life had stopped. It was so absorbing in its astonish¬ 
ment that everything else became simple. Even when 
Elizabeth entered, and came to put her arms around 
Nannie, Blair hardly noticed her. As the doctor and 
Robert Ferguson spoke together in low tones, of terrible 
things they called “arrangements,” Sarah Maitland’s 
son listened, and tried to make himself understand that 
they were talking of—his mother! 

“I shall stay until everything has been done,” Mr. 
Ferguson said, after the doctor left them. “ Blair, you 
and Elizabeth will be here, of course, to-night ? Or else 
I’ll stay. Nannie mustn’t be alone.” 

Blair nodded. “Of course,” he said. At which 
Nannie, who had been crying softly to herself, suddenly 
looked up. 

“ I would rather be by myself. I don’t want any one 
here. Please go home with Elizabeth, Blair. Please!” 

“But Nannie dear, I want to stay,” Blair began, 
gently; she interrupted him, almost hysterically: 

“No! Please! It troubles me. I would rather you 
didn’t. I~I want to be alone.” 

“Well,” Blair said, vaguely; he was too dazed to 
protest. 

Robert Ferguson yielded too, though with a little 
surprise at her vehemence. Then he turned to Blair; 
“I’ll give you some telegrams that must be sent,” he said, 
in the old friendly voice. It was only when he wrote 
a despatch to David’s mother that the world was sud¬ 
denly adjusted to its old levels of anger and contempt. 
“I’ll send this myself,” he said, coldly. Blair, with 
instant intuition, replied as coldly, “Oh, very well.” 

He and Elizabeth went back to the hotel in silence, 
each deeply shaken by the mere physical fact of death. 
When they reached the gloomy granite columns of the 
old River House, Blair left his wife, saying briefly some¬ 
thing about “walking for a while.” He wanted to be 
alone. This was not because he felt any lack of sym- 
340 


THE IRON WOMAN 


pathy in Elizabeth; on the contrary, he was nearer to 
her than at any time since their marriage; but it was a 
moment that demanded solitude. So he wandered about 
Mercer’s streets by himself until after midnight—down 
to the old covered bridge, past Mrs. Todd’s ice-cream 
saloon, out into the country, where the wind was rising, 
and the tree-tops had begun to sway against the sky. 

There is a bond, it appears, between mother and child 
which endures as long as they do. It is independent of 
love; reason cannot weaken it; hate cannot destroy it. 
When a man’s mother dies, something in the man dies, 
too. Blair Maitland, walking aimlessly about in the 
windy May midnight, standing on the bridge watching 
the slipping twinkle of a star in the inky ripples below 
him, was vaguely conscious of this. He thought, with a 
reluctance that was almost repulsion, of her will. He did 
not want to think of it, it was not fitting! Yet he knew, 
back in his mind, that within a few days, as soon as 
decency permitted, he would take the necessary steps 
to contest it. Nor did he think definitely of her; cer¬ 
tainly not of all the unbeautiful things about her, those 
acute, incessant trivialities of ugliness which had been 
a veil between them all his life. Now, the veil was rent, 
and behind it was a holy of holies,—^the inviolable re¬ 
lation of the child and the mother. It was of this that 
he thought, inarticulately, as he stood on the bridge, 
listening to the rush of the wind; this, and the bare and 
unbelievable fact that she “was not.” As he struggled 
to realize her death, he was aware of a curious uneasiness 
that was almost fright. 

When he came to Nannie the next morning, he was 
still deeply absorbed; and when she put something into 
his hands and said it was from his mother, he suddenly 
wept. 

They had respected Nannie’s desire to be alone that 
night, but it was nearly twelve before she was really 
341 


THE IRON WOMAN 


left to herself, and the house was silent. Robert Fergu¬ 
son had made her go up-stairs to bed, and bidden the 
worn-out nurse sleep in the room next to her so that she 
would not be so entirely solitary. He himself did not 
go home until those soft and alien footsteps that cross our 
thresholds, and dare as business the offices that Love 
may not essay, had at last died away. Nannie, in her 
bedroom, sat wide-eyed, listening for those footsteps. 
Once she said to herself: “When they have gone—and 
her heart pounded in her throat. At last “they” went; 
she heard the front door close; then, out in the street, 
another door banged softly; after that there was the 
sound of wheels. 

“Now!” she said to herself. But still she did not 
move. . . . Was the nurse asleep? Was Harris up in 
his room in the garret? Was there any one down¬ 
stairs—except Death? Death in Mrs. Maitland’s bed¬ 
room. “ For God’s sake, lock her door!'" Harris had said. 
And they locked it. We generally lock it. Heaven 
knows why! Why do we turn the key on that poor, 
broken, peaceful thing, as if it might storm out in the 
night, and carry us back with it into its own silence? 

It was almost dawn—the high spring dawn that in 
May flushes even Mercer’s skies at three o’clock in the 
morning, when, lamp in hand, Nannie Maitland opened 
her bedroom door and peered into the upper hall. Out¬ 
side, the wind, which had begun to blow at sunset, was 
roaring around the old house; it rumbled in the chim¬ 
neys, and a sudden gust tore at a loose shutter, and sent 
it banging back against the bricks. But in the house 
everything was still. The window over the front door 
was an arch of glimmering gray barred by the lines of the 
casement; but toward the well of the staircase there was 
nothing but darkness. Nannie put a hesitating foot 
across her own threshold, paused, then came gliding 
out into the hall; at the head of the stairs she looked 
down into a gulf of still blackness; the close, warm air 
342 


THE IRON WOMAN 

of the house seemed to press against her face. She 
listened intently : no sound, except the muttering in¬ 
difference of the wind about the house. Slowly, step 
by step, shivering and shrinking, she began to creep 
down-stairs. At the closed door of the dining-room— 
next to that other room which Harris had bidden them 
lock up; she stood for a long time, her fingers trembling 
on the knob; her lamp, shaking in her hand, cast a 
nimbus of light around her small gray figure. It seemed 
to her as if she could not turn that knob. Then, with 
gasp of effort, it was done, and she entered. Her first 
look was at that place on the floor, where for the last two 
days the pillows had been piled. The pillows were not 
there now; the room was in new, bleak order. In¬ 
stantly, after that shrinking glance at the floor, she 
looked toward Mrs. Maitland’s room, and her hand went 
to her throat as if she could not breathe. A moment 
afterward she began to creep across the floor, one ter¬ 
rified step dragging after another; she walked sidewise, 
always keeping her head turned toward that silent room. 
Just as she reached the big desk, the wind, sucking under 
the locked door, shook it with sly insinuation;—in¬ 
stantly she wheeled about, and stood, swaying with 
fright, her back against the desk. She stood there, pant¬ 
ing, for^a full minute. The terror of that furtively 
shaken door was agonizing. Then, very slowly, with a 
sidewise motion so that she could look toward the room, 
she put her lamp down on the top of the desk, and began, 
with constant bird-like glances over her shoulder, to 
search. . . . Yes; there it was! just where she herself 
had put it, slipped between the pages of a memorandum- 
book, so that if, in another gleam of consciousness, Blair’s 
mother should ask for it, there need be no delay in getting 
it. When her fingers closed on it, she turned, swiftly, 
so that the room might not be behind her. Always 
watching the locked door, she groped for pen and ink 
and some sheets of paper, which she carried over to the 

343 


THE IRON WOMAN 


table. Then she drew up a chair, folded back the sleeves 
of her wrapper, propped the memorandum-book—which 
had on the inside page the flowing signature of its owner 
—open before her. Then, slowly and steadily, she 
began to do the thing she had come to do. Instantly 
she was calmer. When a great gust of wind rumbled 
suddenly in the chimney, and a wraith of ashes blew 
out of the fireplace, she did not even raise her eyes; but 
once she looked over toward the room, and smiled, as 
if to say “ It is all right. I am making it all right!” 

It took her a long time, this business that would make 
it “all right,” this business that brought her, a creature 
who ail her life had been afraid of her own shadow, creep¬ 
ing down to the dining-room, creeping past the room into 
which Death had been locked, creeping over to the desk, 
to that unsigned indorsement which had been meant for 
Blair! It took a long time. Sheet after sheet of paper 
was scrawled over, held up beside the name in the note¬ 
book, then tossed into the empty grate. At last she 
did it; 

Sarah Maitland 

When she had finished, her relief, in having done what 
she could to carry out the purpose of the dying hand, was 
so great that she was able, without once looking over her 
shoulder, to put the pen and ink back into the desk and 
set a match to the papers in the fireplace. Indeed, as she 
took up her lamp to creep up-stairs again, she even 
stopped and touched the knob of the locked door with a 
sort of caress. 

But when, with a last breathless rush across the upper 
hall, she regained her own room, she bolted her door with 
furious panic-stricken hands, then sank, almost fainting, 
upon her bed. 


CHAPTER XXX 


The Maitland Works were still. High in the dusty 
gloom of the foundry, a finger of sunshine pointing down 
from a grimy window touched the cold lip of a cupola 
and traveled noiselessly over rows of empty molds upon 
the blackened fioor. The cast-house was silent. The 
Yards were deserted. The pillar of fire was out; the 
pillar of smoke had faded away. 

In the darkened parlor of her great house, Sarah Mait¬ 
land was still, too. Lines of sunshine fell between the 
bowed shutters, and across them wavering motes swam 
noiselessly from gloom to gloom. The marble serenities 
of death were without sound; the beautiful, powerless 
hands were empty, even of the soft futility of flowers; 
some one had placed lilies-of-the-valley in them, but her 
son, with new, inarticulate appreciation, lifted them and 
took them away. The only sound that broke the dusky 
stillness of the room was the subdued brush of black 
garments, or an occasional sigh, or the rustle of a fur¬ 
tively turned page of a hymn-book. Except when, 
standing shoulder to shoulder in the hall, her business 
associates, with hats held decorously before whispering 
lips, spoke to each other of her power and her money,— 
who now had neither money nor power,—the house was 
profoundly still. Then, suddenly, from the head of the 
stairs, a Voice fell into the quietness: 

''Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days, 
that I may he certified how long I have to live. When thou 
with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his 
beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting 

345 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a garment: every man, therefore, is vanity. For mayt 
walketh in a vain show, and disquieteth —” the engine 
of a passing freight coughed, and a cloud of smoke 
billowed against the windows; the strips of sunshine 
falling between the shutters were blotted out; came again 
—went again. Over and over the raucous running jolt 
of backing cars, the rattling bump of sudden breaks, 
swallowed up the voice, declaring the eternal silence; 
“ . . . glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the 
terrestrial is .. . of the sun, and another glory of the 
moon, for one star differeth from . . . Dust to dust, ashes 
to ashes . . 

Out in the street the shadow of her house fell across the 
meager dooryard, where, on its blackened stems, the 
pyrus japonica showed some scattered blood-red blos¬ 
soms; it fell over Shantytown, that packed the sidewalk 
and stared from dingy doors and windows; it fell on her 
men, standing in unrebuked idleness, their lowered voices 
a mutter of energy held, for this waiting moment, in 
leash. A boy who had climbed up the lamp-post an¬ 
nounced shrilly that “It” was coming. Some girls, 
pressing against the rusted iron spears of the fence, and 
sagging under the weight of babies almost as big as 
themselves, called across the street to their mothers, 
“Here she is!” 

And so she came. No squalor of her surroundings 
could mar the pomp of her approach. The rumble of her 
men's voices ceased before it; Shantytown fell silent. 
Out from between the marble columns of her doorway, 
out from under the twisted garland of wistaria murmur¬ 
ous with bees, down the curving steps, along the path to 
the crowded, curious sidewalk, she came. Out of the 
turmoil and the hurry of her life, out of her triumphs and 
arrogances and ambitions, out of her careless generosities 
and her extraordinary successes, she came. And follow¬ 
ing her, with uncovered head, came the sign and symbol 
of her failure—her only son. 

.346 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Up-stairs, in the front hall, standing a little back from 
the \vdde arched window, Nannie,—forbidden by the doc¬ 
tor, because of her fatigue, to go to the grave; and Eliz¬ 
abeth and Miss White, who would not leave her alone,—■ 
looked down on the slowly moving crowd. When Sarah 
Maitland’s men closed in behind her, nearly a thousand 
strong, and the people in twos and threes began to file out 
of the house, Nannie noiselessly turned a slat of the 
Venetian blind. Why! there were those Maitlands from 
the North End. “I didn’t suppose they remembered 
our existence,” she said, her breath still catching in a 
sob; “and there are the Knights,” she whispered to 
Elizabeth. “Do you see old Mrs. Knight? I don’t be¬ 
lieve she’s been to call on Mamma for ten years. I 
never supposed she’d come.” 

Miss White, wiping her eyes as she peered furtively 
through the blinds, said in a whisper that there was So- 
and-so, and that such and such a person was evidently 
going out to the cemetery. “Mrs. Knight is dreadfully 
lame, isn’t she?” Nannie said. “Poor Mamma always 
called her Goose Molly. It was nice in her to come, 
wasn’t it?” 

“Nannie,” some one said, softly. And turning, she 
saw Mrs. Richie. “I came on last night, Nannie dear. 
She was a good, kind friend to me. And David is here, 
too. He hopes you will feel like seeing him. He was 
very fond of her.” Then she looked at Elizabeth: “ How 
do you do ? How is Blair ?” she said, calmly. 

The moment was tense, yet of the four women, Eliza¬ 
beth felt it least. David was in the house! She could 
not feel anything else. 

“Oh, Mrs. Richie—poor Mamma!” Nannie said; and 
with Mrs. Richie’s kind arm about her, she retreated to 
her own room. 

Miss White went hurrying down-stairs—Elizabeth 
knew why! As for her, she stood there in the empty 
hall, quite alone. She heard the carriage doors closing 


THE IRON WOMAN 


out in the street, the sound of horses’ feet, the drag of 
wheels—even the subdued murmur of Shantytown look¬ 
ing on at the show. . . . David was in the house. 

She went to the end of the hall and stood leaning over 
the banisters; she could hear Miss White’s flurried voice; 
then, suddenly, he spoke. It was only some grave word, 
—she did not catch the sense of it, but the sound—the 
sound of his voice! It turned her dizzy. Before she 
knew it she sank down on the top step of the stairs, her 
head against the banisters. She sat there, her face 
haggard with unshed tears, until Mrs. Richie came out 
of Nannie’s room and found her. It was then that 
David’s mother, who thought she had done her best in 
the courteous commonplace of how-do-you-do—suddenly 
did better; she stooped down and kissed Elizabeth’s 
cheek. 

“You poor child!’’ she said; “oh, you poor child!” 
The pity of the slender, crouching figure touched even 
Helena Richie’s heart,—that heart of passionate and re¬ 
sentful maternity; so she was able to kiss her, and say, 
with wet eyes, “poor child!” 

Elizabeth could not speak. Later, when the mother 
and son had left the house. Miss White came up-stairs and 
found her still sitting dumb and tearless, on the top step. 
She clutched at Cherry-pie’s skirt with shaking hands: 
“Did he say—anything?” 

“Oh, my poor lamb,” old Miss White said, nibbling 
and crying, “how could he, here ?” 

David, coming with his mother over the mountains to 
be present at Mrs. Maitland’s funeral, thought to himself 
how strange it was that it had taken death to bring him 
to Mercer. In all those long months of bewildered effort 
to adjust himself to the altered conditions of life, there 
had been an undercurrent of purpose: he would see Eliza¬ 
beth. He would know from her own lips just how things 
were with her. It seemed to David that if he could do 
348 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that, if he could know beyond doubt—or hope—that she 
was happy, he would himself be cured of the incessant, 
dull ache of remorse, which quickened sometimes into the 
stabbing suspicion that she had never really loved him. 
... If she was happy, then he need no longer blame 
himself for injuring her. The injury he had done himself, 
he must bear, as men before him had borne, and as men 
after him would bear, the results of their own sins and 
follies. He had, of course, long since lost the wincing 
self-consciousness of the jilted man, just as he had lost 
the expectation that she would send for him, summon 
him to storm her prison and carry her away to freedom! 
That was a boy’s thought, anyhow. It was when that 
hope had completely faded, that he began to say he must 
see for himself that she was happy and that she did not 
wish to leave the man who had, at any rate, been man 
enough to take her, and whom now, very likely, she loved. 
It was the uncertainty about her happiness that was so 
intolerable to him. Far more intolerable, he thought, 
than would be the knowledge that she was content, 
for that he would deserve, and to the honest mind 
there is a certain satisfaction in receiving its deserts. 
But his hatred of Blair deepened a little at the mere 
suggestion of her contentment. Those evil moments of 
suspecting her loyalty to him at the time of her marriage 
were very rare now; though the evil moments of specu¬ 
lating as to how God—or he himself, would finally 
punish Blair Maitland, were as frequent as ever. 
During the last six months the desire to know how 
things were with Elizabeth had been at times almost 
overwhelming. Once he went so far as to buy his rail¬ 
road ticket; but though his feet carried him to the train, 
his mind drove him away from it, and the ticket was 
not used. But when the news came of Sarah Maitland’s 
death, he went immediately to the station and engaged 
his berth. Then he went home and asked his mother 
if &he were going to the funeral; “I am,” he said. He 

349 


THE IRON WOMAN 


spoke with affection of Mrs. Maitland, but so far as his 
going to Mercer went, her funeral was entirely inciden¬ 
tal. Her death had ended his uncertainty: he would 
see Elizabeth! 

“And when I see her,” he said to himself, “the mo¬ 
ment I see her,—I will know.” He debated with himself 
whether he should speak of the catastrophe of their lives, 
or wait for her to do so. As he thought of putting it into 
words, he was aware of singular shyness, which showed 
him with startling distinctness how far apart he and she 
were. Just how and when he would see her he had not 
decided; probably it could not be on the day Mrs. Mait¬ 
land was buried; but the next day ? “ How shall I man¬ 

age it?” he asked himself—^then found that it had been 
managed for him. 

When they came back from the cemetery, Mrs. Richie 
went to Robert Ferguson’s. “You are to come home 
and have supper with me,” he had told her; “David 
can call for you when he gets through his gallivanting 
about the town.” (David had excused himself, on the 
ground of seeing Knight and one or two of the fellows; 
he had said nothing of his need to walk alone over the 
old. bridge, out into the country, and, in the darkness, 
round and round the River House.) So, in the May 
twilight of Robert Ferguson’s garden, the two old neigh¬ 
bors paced up and down, and talked of Sarah Maitland. 

“ I’ve got to break to David that apparently he isn’t 
going to get the fund for his hospital,” Mr. Ferguson said. 
“ There is no mention of it in her will. She told me once, 
about two years ago, that she was putting money by for 
him, and when she got the amount she wanted she was 
going to give it to him. But she left no memorandum of 
it. I’m afraid she changed her mind.” His voice, 
rather than his words, caught her attention; he was not 
speaking naturally. He seemed to talk for the sake of 
talking, which was so unlike him that Mrs. Richie looked 
at him with mild curiosity. 

350 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Mrs. Maitland had a perfect right to change her 
mind,” she said; “and really David never counted very 
much on the hospital. She spoke of it to him, I know, 
but I think he had almost forgotten it—though I hadn’t,” 
she confessed, a little ruefully. She smiled, and Robert 
Ferguson, fiercely twitching off his glasses, tried to smile 
back; but his troubled eyes lingered questioningly on 
her serene face. It was almost a beautiful face in its 
peace. What was it Mrs. Maitland had said about her 
looks? “Fair and—” He was so angry at remember¬ 
ing the word that he swore softly at himself under his 
breath, and Helena Richie gave him a surprised look. 
He had sworn at himself several times in these five days 
since Sarah Maitland, half delirious, wholly shrewd, had 
said those impossible things about David’s mother. 
Under his concern and grief, under his solemn preoccupa¬ 
tions, Robert Ferguson had felt again and again the shock 
of the incredible suggestion: ''something on her con¬ 
science” Each time the words thrust themselves up 
through his absorbed realization of Mrs. Maitland’s 
death, he pushed them down savagely: “It is impossi¬ 
ble!” But each time they rose again to the surface 
of his mind. When they did, they brought with them, 
as if dredged out of the depths of his memory, some sly 
indorsement of their truth. . . . She never says any¬ 
thing about her husband. “Why on earth should she? 
He was probably a bad egg; that friend of hers, that 
Old Chester doctor, hinted that he was a bad egg. Natu¬ 
rally he is not a pleasant subject of conversation for 
his wife.” . . . Her only friends, except in his own 
little circle, were two old men (one of them dead now), 
in Old Chester. “Well, Heaven knows a parson and a 
doctor are about as good friends as a woman can have.” 

. . . But no women friends belonging to her past. 
“Thank the Lord! If she had a lot of cackling females 
coming to see her, I wouldn’t want to!” . . . She is 
always so ready to defend Elizabeth’s wicked mother. 

23 351 


THE IRON WOMAN 

“She has a tender heart; she’s not hard like the rest of 
her sex.” 

No, Life had not played another trick on him! Mrs. 
Maitland was out of her head, that was all. As for him, 
somebody ought to boot him for even remembering what 
the poor soul had said. And so, disposing of the intolera¬ 
ble suspicion, he would draw a breath of relief—until 
the whisper came again; ''something on her conscience?'' 

He was so goaded by this fancy of a dying woman, 
and at the same time so shaken by her death, that, as his 
guest was quick to see, he was entirely unreal; almost— 
if one can say such a thing of Robert Ferguson, arti¬ 
ficial. He was artificial when he spoke of David and 
the money he was not to have; the fact was, he did 
not at that moment care, he said to himself, a hang 
about David, or his money either! 

“You see,” he said, as they came to the green door in 
the brick wall, and went into the other garden, “you see, 
your house is still empty?” 

“Dear old house!” she said, smiling up at the shuttered 
windows. 

He looked into her face, and its entire candor made 
him suddenly and sharply angry at Sarah Maitland. It 
was the old friendly anger, just as if she were not dead; 
and he found it curiously comforting. (“She ought to 
be ashamed of herself to have such an idea of Mrs. Richie. 
I’ll tell her so—oh. Lord! what am I saying? Well, 
well; she was dying; she didn’t know what she was 
talking about.”) . . . “We could pull down some par¬ 
titions and make the two houses into one,” he said, 
wistfully. 

But she only laughed and shook her head. “I want 
to see if my white peony is going to blossom; come over 
to the stone seat.” 

“You always shut me up,” he said, sulkily; and in 
his sulkiness he was more like himself than he had been 
for days. Sitting by her side on the bench under the 
352 


THE IRON WOMAN 


hawthorn, he let her talk about her peony or anything 
else that seemed to her a safe subject; for himself, all 
he wanted was the comfort of looking into her comforting 
eyes, and telling himself that he insulted her when he 
even denied those poor, foolish, dying words. When 
a sudden soft shower drove them indoors to his library 
he came back with a sigh to Mrs. Maitland; but this 
time he was quite natural: “The queer part of it is, she 
hadn’t changed her mind about David’s money up to 
within two days of her death. She meant him to have it 
when she spoke to me of writing to him; and her 
mind was perfectly clear then; at least’’—he frowned; 
“she did wander for a minute. She had a crazy 
jjiea-” 

“What?” said Mrs. Richie, sympathetically. 

“Nothing; she was wandering. But it was only for 
a minute, and except for that she was clear. When I 
urged her to make some provision for Blair, she was 
perfectly clear. Practically told me to mind my own 
business! Just like her,’’ he said, sighing. 

“It would have been a great deal of money,’’ Mrs. 
Richie said; “probably David is better off without it.’’ 
But he knew she was disappointed; and indeed, after 
supper, in his library, she admitted the disappointment 
frankly enough. “He has changed very much; his 
youth is all gone. He is more silent than ever. I had 
thought that perhaps the building of this hospital would 
bring him out of himself. You see, he blames himself 
for the whole thing.” 

“He is still bitter?” 

“Oh, I’m afraid so. He very rarely speaks of it. 
But I can see that he blames himself always. I wish 
he would talk freely.” 

“He will one of these days. He’ll blurt it out and 
then he’ll begin to get over it. Don’t stop him, and 
don’t get excited, no matter what absurd things he says. 
He’ll be better when he has emptied his heart. I was, 
353 


THE IRON WOMAN 

you know, after I talked to you and told you that Fd 
been—^jilted.” 

“I’m afraid it’s gone too deep for that with David,” 
she said, sadly. 

“It couldn’t go deeper than it did with me, and 
yet you—^you taught me to forgive her. Yes, and to be 
glad, too; for if she hadn’t thrown me over, I wouldn’t 
have known you.” 

“Now stopr Mrs. Richie said, with soft impatience. 

“For a meek and mild looking person,” said Robert 
Ferguson, twitching off his glasses, “you have the most 
infernally strong will. I hate obstinacy.” 

“Mr. Ferguson, be sensible. Don’t talk—^that way. 
Listen: David must see Elizabeth while he is here. This 
situation has got to become commonplace. I meant to 
go home to-morrow morning, but if you will ask us all 
to luncheon—” 

“‘Dinner’! We don’t have your Philadelphia airs in 
Mercer.” 

“Well,‘dinner,’” she said, smiling; “we’ll stay over 
and take the evening train. 

“I won’t ask Blair!” 

“I hate obstinacy,” Mrs. Richie told him, drolly. 
“Well, I am not so very anxious to see Blair myself. 
But I do want Elizabeth and David to meet. You see, 
David means to practise in Mercer—” 

“What! Then you will come here to live? When 
■will you come?” 

“Next spring, I hope. And it is like coming home 
again. The promise of the hospital was a factor in his 
decision, but, even without it, I think he will want to 
settle in Mercer”; she paused and sighed. 

Her old landlord did not notice the sigh. “I’ll get 
the house in order for you right off!” he said, beaming. 
“I suppose you’ll ask for all sorts of new-fangled things! 
A tenant is never satisfied.” He was so happy that he 
barked and chuckled at the same time. 

354 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I hope it’s wise for him to come,” Mrs. Richie said, 
anxiously; “I confess I don’t feel quite easy about it, 
because—Elizabeth will be here; and though, of course, 
nobody is going to think of how things might have been, 
still, it will be painful for them both just at first. That’s 
why I want you to invite us to dinner,—the sooner they 
meet, the sooner things will be commonplace.” 

“When a man has once been in love with a woman,” 
Robert Ferguson said, putting on his glasses carefully, 
“he can hate her, but she can never be commonplace to 
him.” 

And before she knew it she said, impulsively, “Please 
don’t ever hate me.” 

He laid a quick hand on hers that was resting in her 
lap. “I’ll never hate you and you’ll never be common¬ 
place. Dear woman—can’t you?” 

She shook her head; the tears stood suddenly in her 
leaf-brown eyes. 

“Helena!” he said, and there was a half-frightened 
violence in his voice; ''what is it ? Tell me, for Heaven’s 
sake; what is it? Do you hate me?” 

“No—no—no!” 

“If you dislike me, say so! I think I could bear it 
better to believe you disliked me.” 

“Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could 
never dislike you. But our—our age, and David, and—” 

He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked 
hard into her eyes; then for a single minute he covered 
his own. “Don’t talk about age, and all that nonsense. 
Don’t talk about little things, Helena, for God’s sake! 
Oh, my dear—” he said, brokenly. He got up and went 
across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a moment 
or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered, 
her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But 
when he took his chair again, he was “commonplace” 
enough, and when, .later, David came in, he was able 
to talk in the most matter-of-fact way. He told the 

355 


THE IRON WOMAN 


young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had changed 
her mind about a hospital. “Of course some papers 
may turn up that will entitle you to your fund, but I 
confess I’m doubtful about it. I’m afraid she changed 
her mind.’’ 

“Probably she did,” David said, laconically; “well, 
I am glad she thought of it,—even if she didn’t do it. 
She was a big person, Mr. Ferguson; I didn’t half know 
how big a person she was!’’ For a moment his face 
softened until his own preoccupations faded out of it. 

“ Nobody knew how big she was—except me,’’ Robert 
Ferguson said. Then he began to talk about her. . . . 
It was nearly midnight when he ended; when he did, it 
was with an outburst of pain and grief: “ Nobody under¬ 
stood her. They thought because she ran an iron-works, 
that she wasn’t—a woman. I tell you she was! I tell 
you her heart was a woman’s heart. She didn’t care 
about fuss and feathers, and every other kind of tom¬ 
foolery, like all the rest of you, but she was as—as modest 
as a girl, and as sensitive. You needn’t laugh—’’ 

“Laugh?’’ said Helena Richie; “I am ready to cry 
when I think how her body misrepresented her soul!’’ 

He nodded; his chin shook. “Big, generous, in¬ 
capable of meanness, incapable of littleness!—and now 
she’s dead. I believe her disappointment about Blair 
really killed her. It cut some spring. She has never 
been the same woman since he—” He stopped short, 
and looked at David; no one spoke. 

Then Mrs. Richie asked some casual question about the 
Works, and they began to talk of other things. When 
his guests said good-night, Robert Ferguson, standing on 
his door-step, called after them: “Oh, hold on: David, 
won’t you and your mother come in to dinner to-morrow ? 
Luncheon, your mother calls it. She wants us to be 
fashionable in Mercer! Nobody here but Miss White 
and Elizabeth.” 

“Yes, thank you; we’ll come with pleasure,” Mrs. 

3S6 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Richie called back, and felt the young man’s arm grow 
rigid under her hand. 

The mother and son walked on in silence. It had 
stopped raining, but the upper sky was full of fleecy 
clouds laid edge to edge like a celestial pavement; from 
between them sometimes a serene moon looked down. 

“David, you don’t mind staying over for a day?” 

“Oh no, not at all. I meant to.” 

“And you don’t mind—seeing Elizabeth?” 

“ I want to see her. Will he be there ?” 

“Blair? No! Certainly not. It wouldn’t be pleas¬ 
ant for—for—” 

“For him?” David said, dryly. “I should think not. 
Still, I am sorry. I have rather a curiosity to see Blair.” 

“Oh, David!” she protested, sadly. 

“My dear mother, don’t be alarmed. I have no in¬ 
tention of calling him out. I am merely interested to 
know how a sneak-thief looks when he meets—” he 
laughed; “the man he has robbed. However, it might 
not be pleasant for the rest of you.” 

His mother was silent; her plan of making things 
“commonplace” was not as simple as she thought. 

Robert Ferguson, on his door-step, looked after them, 
his face falling abruptly into stem lines. When he went 
back to his library he stood perfectly still, his hands in 
his pockets, staring straight ahead of him. Once or 
twice his whole face quivered. Suddenly he struck his 
clenched fist hard on the table: “W^ell!” he said, aloud, 
violently, “what difference does it make?” He lit a 
cigar and sat down, his legs stretched out in front of him, 
his feet crossed. He sat there for an hour, biting on his 
extinguished cigar. Then he said in an unsteady voice, 
“She is a heavenly creature.” The vigil in his library, 
which lasted until the dawn was white above Mercer’s 
smoke, left Robert Ferguson shaken to the point of 
humility. He no longer combated Mrs. Maitland’s wan¬ 
dering words; they did not matter. What mattered was 

357 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the divine discovery that they did not matter! Or 
rather, that they opened his eyes to the glory of the hu¬ 
man soul. To a man of his narrow and obstinate 
council of perfection, \he realization, not only that it 
was possible to enter into holiness through the door of 
sin—that low door that bows the head that should 
be upright—^but that his own possibilities of tenderness 
were wider than he knew,—such a realization was con¬ 
version. It was the recognition that in the matter of 
forgiveness he and his Father were one. Helena might 
or might not “have something on her conscience.” If 
she had, then it proved that she in her humility was 
a better woman than, with nothing on his conscience, 
he in his arrogance was a man; and when he said that, 
he began to understand, with shame, that in regard to 
other people’s wrong-doing he had always been, as 
Sarah Maitland expressed it, “more particular than his 
Creator.” He thought of her words now, and his lean 
face reddened. “ She hit me when she said that. I’ve 
always set up my own Ebenezer. What a fool I must 
have seemed to a woman like Helena. . . . She’s a 
heavenly creature!” he ended, brokenly; “what differ¬ 
ence does it make how she became so ? But if that's the 
only reason she keeps on refusing me—” 

When Elizabeth and David met in Mr. Ferguson’s 
library at noon the next day, everybody was, of course, 
elaborately unconscious. 

Elizabeth came in last. As she entered. Miss White, 
nibbling speechlessly, was fussing with the fire-irons of a 
grate filled with white lilacs. Mrs. Richie, turning her 
back upon her son, began to talk entirely at random to 
Robert Ferguson, who was rapidly pulling out books 
from the bookcase at the farther end of the room. David 
was the only one who made no pretense. When he heard 
the front door close and knew that she was in the house, 
he stood staring at the library door. Elizabeth, enter- 
358 


THE IRON WOMAN 

ing, walked straight up to him, and put out her 
hand. 

“How are you, David?” she said. 

David, taking the small, cold hand in his, said, calmly. 

How’re you, Elizabeth ?” Then their eyes met. Hers 
held steadfast; it was his which fell. 

“Have you seen Nannie?” she said. 

And he: “Yes; poor Nannie!” 

“Hullo, Elizabeth,” her uncle called out, carelessly; 
and Mrs. Richie came over and kissed her. 

So that first terrible moment was lived through. Dur¬ 
ing luncheon, they hardly spoke to each other. Elizabeth, 
with obvious effort, talked to Mrs. Richie of Nannie and 
Mrs. Maitland; David talked easily and (for him) a great 
deal, to Robert Ferguson; he talked politics, and dis¬ 
gusted his iron-manufacturing host by denouncing the 
tariff; he talked municipal affairs, and said that Mercer 
had a lot of private virtue, but no public morals. “ Look 
at your streets!” said the squirt. In those days, the 
young man who criticized the existing order was a squirt; 
now he is a cad; but in the nostrils of middle age, he is as 
rankly unpleasant by one name as by the other. Eliza¬ 
beth’s uncle was so annoyed that he forgot the embar¬ 
rassment of the occasion, and said, satirically, to Mrs. 
Richie: “Well, well! ‘ See how we apples swim ’!” which 

made her laugh, but did not disturb David in the least. 
The moment luncheon was over, Elizabeth rose. 

“I must go and see Nannie,” she said; and David, 
opening the door for her, said, “I’ll go along with you.”^ 
At which their elders exchanged a startled look. 

Out in the street they walked side by side—these two 
between whom there was a great gulf fixed. By that 
time the strain of the occasion had begun to show in 
Elizabeth’s face; she was pale, and the tension of her 
set lips drew the old dimple into a livid line. David was 
apparently entirely at ease, speaking lightly of this or 
that; Elizabeth answered in monosyllables. Once, at a 

359 


THE IRON WOMAN 


crossing, he laid an involuntary hand on her arm—but 
instantly lifted it as if the touch had burnt him! 
“Lookout!” he said, and for the first time his voice 
betrayed him. But before the clattering dray had 
passed, his taciturn self-control nad returned: “ you can 
hardly hear yourself think, in Mercer,” he said. Eliza¬ 
beth was silent; she had come to the end of effort. 

It was not until they reached the iron gate of Mrs. 
Maitland’s house that he dragged his quivering reality 
out of the inarticulate depths, but his brief words were 
flat and meaningless to the strained creature beside him. 

“ I was glad to see you to-day,” he said. 

And she, looking at him with hard eyes, said that it 
was very kind in him and in his mother to come on to 
Mrs. Maitland’s funeral. “ Nannie was so touched by it,” 
she said. She could not say another- word; not even 
good-by. She opened the gate and fled up the steps to 
the front door. 

David, so abruptly deserted, stood for a full minute 
looking at the dar k old house, where the wistaria looping 
above the pillared doorway was blossoming in wreaths 
of lavender and faint green. 

Then he laughed aloud. “ What a fool I am,” he said. 


CHAPTER XXXi 


When Nannie Maitland, trembling very much, pressed 
into her brother’s hand that certificate for what was, 
in those days, a very considerable fortune, Blair had 
been deeply moved. It came after a night, not of 
grief, to be sure, but of what might be called cosmic 
emotion,—^the child’s realization of the parent’s death. 
When he saw the certificate, and knew that at the 
last moment his mother’s ruthless purpose had flagged, 
her iron will had bent, a wave of something like ten¬ 
derness rose above his hate as the tide rises above 
wrecking rocks. For a moment he thought that even 
if she had carried out her threat of disinheriting him he 
would be able to forgive her. But as inevitably the 
wave of feeling ebbed, and he saw again those black rocks 
of hate below the moving brightness of the tide, he re¬ 
minded himself that this gift of hers was only a small part 
of what belonged to him. In a way it was even a con¬ 
fession that she had wronged him. She had written his 
name, Nannie told him with a curious tremor in her 
hands and face, “just at the last. It was that last 
morning,” Nannie said, huskily, trying to keep her voice 
steady; “she hadn’t time to change her will, but this 
shows she was sorry she made it.” 

‘‘I don’t know that that follows,” Blair said, gravely. 
It was not until the next day that he referred to it again: 
“After all, Nannie, if her will is what she said it would 
be, it is—outrageous, you know. This money doesn’t 
alter that.” 

Yet somehoWo Sn those days before the funeral^ when- 
361 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ever he thought of breaking the will, that relenting gift 
seemed to stay his hand. The idea of using her money 
to thwart her purpose, of taking what she had given 
him, from affection and a tardy sense of justice, to in¬ 
sult her memory, made him uncomfortable to the point 
of irritability. It was esthetically offensive. Once he 
sounded Elizabeth on the subject, and her agreeing out¬ 
cry of disgust drove him into defending himself: “Of 
course we don’t know yet what her will is; but if she has 
done what she threatened, it is abominable; and I’ll 
break it—” 

“With the money she gave you?” she said. 

And he said, boldly, “Yes!” 

But he was not really bold; he was perplexed and 
unhappy, for his hope that his mother had not disin¬ 
herited him was based on something a little finer than 
his wish to come into his own; it was a real reluctance 
to do violence to a relationship of which he had first 
become conscious the night she died. But with that 
reluctance, was also the instinct of self-defense: “ I have 
a right to her money!” 

The day after the funeral he went to Mrs. Maitland’s 
lawyers with a request to see the will. 

“Certainly,” the senior member of the firm said; 
“as you are a legatee a copy has already been prepared 
for you. I regret, Blair, that your mother took the 
course she did. I cannot help saying to you that we 
ventured to advise against it. 

“I was aware of my mothers purpose,” Blair said, 
briefly; and added, to himself, “she has done it! ... I 
shall probably contest the will,” he said aloud. 

Sarah Maitland’s old friend and adviser looked at him 
sympathetically. “No use, my boy; it’s cast-iron. 
That was her own phrase, ‘cast-iron.’” Then, really 
sorry for him, he left him in the inner office so that he 
might read that ruthless document alone. 

Mrs. Maitland had said it was a pity she could not live 
362 


fHE IRON WOMAN 


to see Blair fight her will; she “would like the fun of it/' 
She would not have found any food for mirth if she could 
have seen her son in that law-office reading,with set teeth, 
her opinion of himself, her realization of her responsi¬ 
bility in making him what he was, and her reason for 
leaving him merely a small income from a trust fund. 
Had it not been for the certificate—in itself a denial of 
her cruel words—^lying at that moment in his breast 
pocket, he would have been unable to control his fury. 
As it was, underneath his anger was the consciousness 
that she had made what reparation she could. 

When he folded the copy of the will and thrust it into 
his pocket his face was very pale, but he could not resist 
saying to old Mr. Howe as he passed him in the outer 
office, “ I hope you will be pleased, sir, in view of your 
protest about this will, to know that my mother re¬ 
gretted her course toward me, and left a message to that 
effect with my sister.” 

“I am glad to hear it,” the astonished lawyer said, 
“but—” 

Blair did not wait to hear the end of his sentence. 
He said to himself that even before he made up his mind 
what to do about the will he must get possession of his 
money—“or the first thing I know some of their con¬ 
founded legal quibbles will make trouble for me,” he said. 

Certainly there was no trouble for him as yet; the 
process of securing his mother’s gift involved nothing 
more than the depositing of the certificate in his own 
bank. The cashier, who knew Sarah Maitland’s name 
very well indeed on checks payable to her son, ventured 
to offer his condolences: “Your late mother was a very 
v/onderful woman, Mr. Maitland. There was no better 
business man this side of the Alleghanies than your 
mother, sir.” 

Blair bowed; he was too absorbed to make any con¬ 
ventional reply. The will: should he or should he not 
contest it ? His habit of indecision made the mere ques- 

363 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tion—^apart from its gravity—acutely painful; not even 
the probabilities of the result of such a contest helped 
him to decide what to do. The probabilities were grimly 
clear. Blair had, perhaps, a little less legal knowledge 
than the average layman, but even he could not fail to 
realize that Sarah Maitland's will was, as Mr. Howe had 
said, “iron.” Even if it could be broken, it might take 
years of litigation to do it. “ And a ‘ bird in the hand ’ I” 
Blair reminded himself cynically. “But,” he told 
Nannie, a week or two later when she was repeating 
nervously, for the twentieth time, just how his mother 
had softened toward him,—“but those confounded 
orphan asylums make me mad! If she wanted orphans, 
what about you and me ? Charity begins at home. I 
swear I’ll contest the will!” 

Nannie did not smile; she very rarely smiled now. 
Miss White thought she was grieving over her step¬ 
mother’s death; and Elizabeth said, pityingly, “I didn’t 
realize she was so fond of her.” Perhaps Nannie did 
not realize it herself until she began to miss her step¬ 
mother’s roughness, her arrogant generosity, her temper, 
—to miss, even, the mere violence of her presence; then 
she began to grieve softly to herself. “Oh, Mamma, I 
wish you hadn’t died,” she used to say, over and over, 
as she lay awake in the darkness. She lay awake a 
great deal in those first weeks. 

All her life Nannie had been like a little leaf whirled 
along by a great gale of thundering power and purpose 
which she never attempted to understand, much less 
contend with; now, abruptly, the gale had dropped, and 
all her world was still. No wonder she lay awake at 
night to listen to such stillness! Apart from grief the 
mere shock of sudden quietness might account for her 
nervousness, Robert Ferguson said; but he was perplexed 
at her lack of interest in her own affairs. She seemed ut¬ 
terly unaware of the change in her circumstances. That 
she was a rich woman now was a matter of indifference to 
364 


THE IRON WOMAN 


her. And she seemed equally unconscious of her free¬ 
dom. Apparently it never occurred to her that she 
could alter her mode of life. Except that, at Blair’s 
insistence, she had a maid, and that Harris had cleared 
the office paraphernalia from the dining-room table, life 
in the stately, dirty, melancholy old house still ran in 
those iron grooves which Mrs. Maitland had laid down 
for herself nearly thirty years before. Nannie knew 
nothing better than the grooves, and seemed to desire 
nothing better. She was indifferent to her surroundings, 
and what was more remarkable, indifferent to Blair’s 
perplexities; at any rate, she was of no assistance to 
him in making up his mind about the will. His vacil¬ 
lations hardly seemed to interest her. Once he said, 
suppose instead of contesting it, he should go to 
work ? But she only said, vaguely, “ That would be very 
nice.” 

Curiously enough, in the midst of his uncertainties, 
a little certainty had sprung up: it was the realization 
that work, merely as work, might be amusing. In these 
months of tormenting jealousy, of continually crushed 
hope that Elizabeth would begin to care for him, of occa¬ 
sional shamed consciousness of having taken advantage 
of a woman—Blair Maitland had had very little to 
amuse him. So, in those hesitating weeks that followed 
his mother’s death, work, which her will necessitated, 
began to interest him. Perhaps the interest, if not the 
amusement, was enhanced by one or two legal opinions 
as to the possibility of breaking the will. Harry Knight 
read it, and grinned: 

” Well, old man, as you wouldn’t give me the case any¬ 
how, I can afford to be perfectly disinterested and tell 
you the truth. In my opinion, it would put a lot of cash 
into some lawyer’s pocket to contest this will; but I bet 
it would take a lot out of yours! You’d come out the 
small end of the horn, my boy.” 

But Knight was young, Blair reflected, and perhaps his 

365 


THE IRON WOMAN 


opinion wasn’t worth anything. “He’s ‘Goose Molly’s 
son,” he said to himself, with a half-laugh; it was strange 
how easily he fell into his mother’s speech sometimes! 
With a distrust of Harry Knight’s youth as keen as her 
own might have been, Blair stated his case to a lawyer 
in another city. 

“Before reading the will,” said this gentleman, “let 
me inquire, sir, whether there is any doubt in your mind 
of your mother’s mental capacity at the time the instru¬ 
ment was drawn ?” 

“My mother was Sarah Maitland, of the Maitland 
Works,” said Blair, briefly; and the lawyer’s involuntary 
exclamation of chagrin would have been laughable, if it 
had not been so significant. “But we should, of course, 
be glad to represent you, Mr. Maitland,” he said. Blair, 
remembering Harry Knight’s disinterested remark about 
pockets, said, dryly,“Thanks, very much,” and took his 
departure. “ He must think I’m Mr. Doestick’s friend,” 
he told himself. The old joke was his mother’s way of 
avoiding an emphatic adjective when she especially felt 
the need of it; but he had forgotten that she had ever 
used it. 

As he walked from the lawyer’s office to his hotel, he 
was absorbed to the point of fatigue in his effort to make 
up his mind, but it was characteristic of him that even in 
his absorption he winced at the sight of a caged robin, 
sitting, moping on its perch, in front of a tobacconist’s. 
He had passed the poor wild thing and walked a block, 
before he turned impulsively on his heel, and came back 
to interview the shopkeeper. “How much will you sell 
him for?” he said, with that charming manner that 
always made people eager to oblige him. The robin, 
looking at him with lack-luster eyes, sunk his poor lit¬ 
tle head down into his dulled feathers; there was some¬ 
thing so familiar in the movement, that Blair cringed. 

“I want to buy the little beggar,” he said, so eagerly 
that the owner mentioned a preposterous price. Blair 
366 


THE IRON WOMAN 


took the money out of his pocket, and the bird out of 
the cage. For a minute the captive hesitated, cling¬ 
ing with terrified claws to his rescuer’s friendly finger. 
“Off with you, old fellow!” Blair said, tossing the bird 
up into the air; and the unused wings were spread! 
For a minute the eyes of the two men followed the joyous 
flight over the housetops; then the tobacconist grinned 
rather sheepishly: “Guess you’ve struck oil, ain’t you.? 
—or somebody’s left you a fortune.” 

Blair chuckled. “Think so?” he said. But as he 
walked on down the street, he sighed; how dull the 
robin’s eyes had been. Elizabeth’s eyes looked like 
that sometimes. “What a donkey I am,” he said to 
himself; “ten dollars! Well, I’ll have to contest the 
will and get that fortune, or I can’t keep up the liberator 
role!” Then he fell to thinking how he must invest 
what fortune he had—anything to get that confounded 
robin out of his head! “I’m not going to keep all my 
money in a stocking in the bank,” he told himself. The 
idea of investment pleased him; and when he got back 
to Mercer he devoted himself to consultations with 
brokers. After some three months of it, he found the 
‘work,’ as he called it, distinctly amusing. “ It’s mighty 
interesting,” he told his wife once; “I really like it.” 

Elizabeth said, languidly, that she hoped he would go 
into business because it would have pleased his mother. 
Since Mrs. Maitland’s death, Elizabeth had not seemed 
well; no one connected her languor with that speechless 
walk with David to Nannie’s door, or her look into his 
eyes when she bade farewell to a hope that she had not 
known she was cherishing. But the experience had been 
a profound shock to her. His entire ease, his interest 
in other matters than the one matter of her life, and 
most of all his casual “glad to see you,” meant that he 
had forgiven her, and so no longer loved her,—for of 
course, if he loved her he would not forgive her! In 
these two years she had told herself with perfect sin- 
24 367 


THE IRON WOMAN 


cerity, a thousand times, that he had ceased to love 
her; but now it seemed to her that, for the first time, 
she really knew it. “He doesn’t even hate me,” she 
thought, bleakly. For sheer understanding of suffering 
she grew a little gentler to Blair; but her sympathy, 
although it gave him moments of hope, did not reach 
the point of helping him to decide what to do about 
the will. So, veering between the sobering reflection that 
litigation was probably useless, and the esthetically re¬ 
pulsive idea of usin^ his mother’s confession of regret to 
fight her, he reached no decision. Meantime, “invest¬ 
ment” slipped easily into speculation,—speculation which, 
by that strange tempering of the wind that sometimes 
comes before the lamb is shorn, was remarkably successful. 

It was gossip about this speculation that made Robert 
Ferguson prick up his ears: “Where in thunder does he 
get the money to monkey with the stock-market?” he 
said to himself; “he hasn’t any securities to put up, and 
he can’t borrow on his expectations any more,—every¬ 
body knows she cut him off with a shilling!” He was 
concerned as well as puzzled. “I’ll have him on my 
hands yet,” he thought, morosely. “Confound it! It’s 
hard on me that she disinherited him. He’ll be a mill¬ 
stone round my neck as long as he lives.” Robert 
Ferguson had long ago made up his mind—with tender¬ 
ness—that he must support Elizabeth, “but I won’t 
supply that boy with money to gamble with! And if he 
goes on in this wa}^, of course he’ll come down on me for 
the butcher’s bill.” That was how he happened to ask 
Elizabeth about Blair’s concerns. When he did, the 
whole matter came out. It was Sunday morning. 
Elizabeth, starting for church, had asked Blair, per¬ 
functorily, if he were going. “Church?” he said—he 
was sitting at his writing-table, idly spinning a penny; 
'"not I! I’m going to devote the Sabbath day to de^ 
ciding about the will.” She had made no comment, and 
his lip hardened. “She doesn’t care what I do,” he said 
368 


IHE IRON WOMAN 


to himself, gloomily; yet he believed she would be pleased 
if he refused to fight. “ Heads or tails,” he said, listening 
to her retreating step; “suppose I say ‘heads, bird in the 
hand;—work. Tails, bird in the bush;—fight.’ Might as 
well decide it this way if she won’t help me.” 

She had never thought of helping him; instead she 
stopped at her uncle’s and went out into the garden with 
him to watch him feed his pigeons. When that was 
over, they came back together to the library, and it was 
while she was standing at his big table buttoning her 
gloves that he asked her if Blair was speculating. 

Yes; she believed he was. No; not with her money; 
that had been just about used up, anyhow; although 
he had paid it all back to her when he got his money. 
“Will you invest it for me. Uncle Robert?” she said. 

“Of course; but mind,” he barked, with the old, com¬ 
fortable crossness, “you won’t get any crazy ten per 
cent, out of my investments! You’ll have to go to Blair 
Maitland’s wildcats for that. But if he isn’t using your 
money, how on earth can he speculate? What do you 
mean by ‘his’ money?” 

“Why,” she explained, surprised, “he has all that 
money Mrs. Maitland gave him the day she died.” 

“What!” 

“Didn’t you know about the check?” she said; she 
had not mentioned it to him herself, partly because of 
their tacit avoidance of Blair’s name, but also because 
she had taken it for granted that he was av/are of what 
Mrs. Maitland had done. She told him of it now, add¬ 
ing, in a smothered voice, “She forgave him for marr3dng 
me, you see, at the end.” 

He was silent for a few moments, and Elizabeth, glanc¬ 
ing at the clock, was turning to go, but he stopped her. 
“Hold on a minute. I don’t understand this business. 
Tell me all about it, Elizabeth.” 

She told him what little she knew, rather vaguely: 
Mrs. Maitland had drawn a check—no; she believed it 

.369 


THE IRON WOMAN 


was called a bank certificate of deposit. It was for a 
great deal of money. When she told him how much, 
Robert Ferguson struck his fist on the arm of his chair. 
“That’s it!” he said. “That is where David’s money 
went!” 

David's money?” Elizabeth said, breathlessly. 

“I see it now,” he went on, angrily; “she had the 
money on hand; that’s why she tried to write that letter. 
How Fate does get ahead of David every time!” 

“Uncle! What do you mean?” 

He told her, briefly, of Mrs. Maitland’s plan. “She 
said two years ago that she was going to give David a 
lump sum. I didn’t know she had got it salted down—■ 
she was pretty close-mouthed about some things; but 
I guess she had. Well, probably, at the last minute, 
she thought she had been hard on Blair, and decided 
to hand it over to him, instead of giving it to David. 
She had a right to, a perfect right to. But I don’t under¬ 
stand it! The very day she spoke of writing to David, 
she told me she wouldn’t leave Blair a cent. It isn’t like 
her to whirl about that way—unless it was during one of 
those times when she wasn’t herself. Well,” he ended, 
sighing, “there is nothing to be done about it, of course; 
but I’ll see Nannie, and get at the bottom of it, just for 
my own satisfaction.” 

Elizabeth’s color came and went; she reminded her- 
self that she must be fair to Blair; his mother had a 
right to show her forgiveness by leaving the money to 
him instead of David. Yes; she must remember that; 
she must be just to him. But even as she said so she 
ground her teeth together. 

“Blair did not try to influence his mother, Uncle 
Robert,” she said, “if that’s what you are thinking of. 
He didn’t see her while she was sick. He has never 
seen her since—since—” 

“There are other ways of influencing people than by 
seeing them. He wrote to Nannie, didn’t he?” 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“If I thought," Elizabeth said in a low voice, “that 
Blair had induced Nannie to influence Mrs. Maitland, I 
would—" But she did not finish her sentence. “Good- 
by, Uncle Robert. I’m going to see Nannie." 

As she hurried down toward Shantytown through the 
Sunday emptiness of the hot streets, she said to herself 
that if Nannie had made her stepmother give the money 
to Blair, she, Elizabeth, would do something about it! 
“I won’t have it!" she said, passionately. 

It had been a long time since Elizabeth’s face had 
been so vivid. The old sheet-lightning of anger began 
to flash faintly across it. She did not know what she 
would do to Nannie if Nannie had induced Mrs. Maitland 
to rob David, but she would do something! Yet when 
she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute; 
Nannie’s tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so 
pitifully in evidence that she could not burst into her 
owm perplexity. 

She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her 
mind about many small, crowding affairs incident to the 
situation. In these weeks since Mrs. Maitland’s death, 
Nannie, for the first time in her life, found herself obliged 
to answer questions. Harris asked them: “You ain’t 
a-goin’ to be livin’ here. Miss Nannie; ’tain’t no use to 
fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them: 
“Your Mamma’s clothes ought to be put in camphor, 
dear child, or else given away; which do you mean to 
do?" Blair asked them: “When will you move out of 
this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A dozen times a day 
she was asked to make up her mind, she whose mind had 
always been made up for her! 

That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurry¬ 
ing down to Shantytown with the lightning flickering in 
her clouded eyes, Nannie, owing to Miss White’s per¬ 
sistence about camphor, had gone into Mrs. Maitland’s 
room to look over her things. 

Oh, these “things"! These pitiful possessions that 

371 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the helpless dead must needs leave to the shrinking 
disposal of those who are left! How well every mourner 
knows them, knows the ache of perplexity and dismay 
that comes with the very touch of them. It is not the 
valuables that make grief shrink, — they settle them¬ 
selves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver 
belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But 
what about the dear, valueless, personal things that 
neither side of the family wants ? Things treasured by 
the silent dead because of some association unknown, per¬ 
haps, to those who mourn. What about these precious, 
worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal pos¬ 
sessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. 
There was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so 
old that Nannie could not remember when it had not 
been there hanging from the slender neck of a bottle 
of German cologne. She took it up now, and looked 
at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long 
ago that moon had waxed and waned! “She loved it,” 
Nannie said to herself, “because Blair gave it to her.” 
Standing on the bureau was the row of his photographs; 
on each one his mother had written his age and the date 
when the picture had been taken. In the disorder of the 
top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse handker¬ 
chiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were 
relics of her son’s babyhood: a little green morocco 
slipper, with a white china button on the ankle-band; 
a rubber rattle, cracked and crumbling. . . . What is 
one to do with things like these ? Bum them, of course. 
There is nothing else that can be done. Yet the mourner 
shivers when the flame touches them, as though the cool 
fingers of the dead might feel the scorch I Poor, fright¬ 
ened Nannie was the last person who could light such a 
holy fire; she took them up—^the slipper or the calendar, 
and put them down again. “Poor Mammal” she said 
over and over. Then she saw a bunch of splinters tied 
together with one of Blair’s old neckties; she held it in 

372 


THE IRON WOMAN 


her hand for a minute before she realized that it was 
part of a broken cane. She did not know when or why 
it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair’s, and her 
eyes smarted with tears. “Oh, how she loved him!” 
she thought, and drew a breath of satisfaction remem¬ 
bering how she had helped that speechless, dying love 
to express itself. 

She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting 
things up, then putting them back again, unable to 
decide what to do with any of them, when Elizabeth 
suddenly burst in: 

“ Nannie!” 

“Oh, I am so glad you’ve come!” Nannie said. She 
made a helpless gesture. “Elizabeth, what shall I do 
with everything?” 

Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she 
had hurried down here to ask paused before such forlorn 
preoccupation. 

“Of course her dresses Harris will give away—” 

“Oh no!” Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. “Don’t 
give them to a servant.” 

“But,” poor Nannie protested, “they are so dread¬ 
ful, Elizabeth. Nobody can possibly wear them, except 
people like some of Harris’s friends. But things like 
these—what would you do with these?” She held out 
a discolored pasteboard box broken at the comers and 
with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded 
blue cotton. “I never saw her wear them but once, 
and they are so ugly,” Nannie mourned. 

“Nannie,” Elizabeth said, “I want to ask you some¬ 
thing. That certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what 
made her give it to him ?” 

Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and 
turned sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting 
on the edge of Mrs. Maitland’s narrow iron bed; the scared 
attention of her eyes banished their vagueness. “What 
made her give it to him? Why, love, of course! Don’t 


THE IRON WOMAN 


you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than anybody 
in the world, even if he did—displease her?” 

“Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it 
to him.” 

“I did not!” 

“Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?” 

“ I asked her once, while she was ill, wouldn’t she please 
be nice to Blair,—if you call that suggesting! As for 
the certificate, that last morning she sort of woke up, 
and told me to bring it to her to sign. And I did.” 

She turned back to the bureau, and put an unsteady 
hand down into the drawer. The color was rising in her 
face, and a muscle in her cheek twitched painfully. 

“ But Nannie,” Elizabeth said, and paused; the dining¬ 
room door had opened, and Robert Ferguson was standing 
on the threshold of Mrs. Maitland’s room looking in at the 
two girls. The astonishmentEe had felt in his talk with 
his niece had deepened into perplexity. “I guess I’ll 
thresh this thing out now,” he said to himself, and picked 
up his hat. He was hardly ten minutes behind Eliza¬ 
beth in her walk down to the Maitland house. 

“Nannie,” he said, kindly,—he never barked at 
Nannie; “can you spare time, my dear, to tell me one or 
two things I want to know?” He had come in, and 
found a dusty wooden chair. “Go ahead with your 
sorting things out. You can answer my question in a 
minute; it’s about that certificate your mother gave 
Blair.” 

Nannie had turned, a.nd was standing with her hands 
behind her gripping the edge of the bureau; she gasped 
once or twice, and glanced first at one inquisitor and then 
at the other; her face whitened slowly. She was like 
some frightened creature at bay; indeed her agitation 
was so marked that Robert Ferguson’s perplexity har¬ 
dened into something like suspicion. ‘ ‘ Can there be any¬ 

thing wrong?” he asked himself in consternation. “ You 
see, Nannie,” he explained, gently, “I happen to know 
374 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that your mother meant it for David Richie, not 
Blair." 

“If she did," said Nannie, '‘she changed her mind." 

“When did she change her mind?" 

“ I don’t know. She just told me to bring the check to 
her to sign, that—that last morning." 

“Was she perfectly clear mentally?" 

“Yes. Yes. Of course she was! Perfectly clear." 

“ Did she say why she had changed her mind ?" 

“No," Nannie said, and suddenly fright and anger to¬ 
gether made her fluent; “but why shouldn’t she change 
her mind, Mr. Ferguson? Isn’t Blair her son? Her 
only son! What was David to Mamma? Would you 
have her give all that money to an outsider, and leave her 
only son penniless ? Perhaps she changed her mind that 
morning. I don’t loiow anything about it. I don’t see 
what difference it makes when she changed it, so long as 
she changed it. All I can tell you is tha^: she told me to 
bring her the check, or certificate, or whatever you call 
it, out of the little safe. And I did, and she made it out 
to Blair. I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t even know she 
had it; but I am thankful she did it!" 

Her eyes were dilating; she put her shaking hand up 
to her throat, as if she were struggling for breath. Her 
statement was perfectly reasonable and probable, yet it 
left no doubt in Robert Ferguson’s mind that there was 
something wrong,—very wrong! Even Elizabeth could see 
it. They both had the same thought: Blair had in some 
way influenced, perhaps even coerced his mother. 
How, they could not imagine, but Nannie evidently 
knew. They looked at each other in dismay. Then 
Elizabeth sprang up and put her arms around her sister- 
in-law. “ Oh, Uncle," she said, “ don’t ask her anything 
more now!" She felt the quiver through all the terrified 
little figure. 

“Mamma wanted Blair to have the money; it’s his! 
No one can take it from him!" 

375 


THE IRON WOMAN 


'^Nobody wants to, Nannie, if it is his honestly,” 
Robert Ferguson said, gravely. 

''HonestlyP' Nannie whispered, with dry lips. 

“Nannie dear, tell us the truth,” Elizabeth implored 
her; “Uncle won’t be hard on Blair, if—if he has done 
wrong. I know he won’t.” 

“Wrong?” said Nannie; “Blair done wrong?” She 
pushed Elizabeth’s arms away; “Blair has never done 
wrong in his life!” She stood there, with her back 
against the bureau, and dared them. “ I won’t have you 
suspect my brother! Elizabeth! How can you let Mr. 
Ferguson suspect Blair?” 

“Nannie,” said Robert Ferguson, “was Blair with his 
mother when she signed that certificate?” 

“No.” 

“Were you alone with her?” 

Silence. 

“Answer me, Nannie.” 

She looked at him with wild eyes, but she said nothing. 
Mr. Ferguson put his hand on her shoulder. “Nannie,” 
he said, quietly, “Blair signed it; Blair wrote his 
mother’s name.” 

“No! No! No! He did not! He did not.” There 
was something in her voice— 2l sort of relief, a sort of 
triumph, even, that the other two could not understand, 
but which made them know that she was speaking the 
truth. “He did not,” Nannie said, in a whisper; “if 
you accuse him of that. I’ll have to tell you; though 
very likely you won’t understand. I did it. For Mam¬ 
ma.” 

“Did what?” Robert Ferguson gasped; “not—? 
You don’t mean—? Nannie! you don’t mean that 
you—” he stopped; his lips formed a word which he 
would not utter. 

“Mamma wanted him to have the money. The day 
before she died she told me she was going to give him a 
present. That day, that last day, she told me to get the 
376 


THE IRON WOMAN 


check. And she wrote his name on it. No one asked 
her to. Not Blair. Not I. I never thought of such a 
thing! I didn’t even know there was a check. She 
wanted to do it. She wrote his name. And then—she 
got weak; she couldn’t go on. She couldn’t sign it. 
So I signed it for her . . . later. It was not v/rong. 
It was right. It carried out her wish. I am glad I did 



CHAPTER XXXIT 


It was not a confession; it was a statement. In tne 
next distressing hour, during which Robert Ferguson 
succeeded in drawing the facts from Blair’s sister, there 
was not the slightest consciousness of wrong-doing. 
Over and over, with soft stubbornness, she asserted her 
conviction: “It was right to do it. Mamma wanted to 
give the money to Blair. But she couldn’t write her 
name. So I wrote it for her. It was right to do it.” 

“Nannie,” her old friend said, in despair, “don’t you 
know what the law calls it, when one person imitates 
another person’s handwriting for such a purpose.” 

“You can call it anything you want to,” she said, 
passionately. “/ call it carrying out Mamma’s wishes. 
And I would do it over again this minute.” 

Robert Ferguson was speechless with dismay. To 
find rigidity in this meek mind, was as if, through layers 
of velvet, through fold on fold of yielding dullness that 
gave at the slightest touch, he had suddenly, at some 
deeper pressure, felt, under the velvet, granite! 

“ It was right,” Nannie said, fiercely, trembling all over, 
“it was right, because it was necessary. Oh, what do 
your laws amount to, when it comes to dying? When 
it comes to a time like that! She was dying —you don’t 
seem to understand—Mamma was dying! And she 
wanted Blair to have that money; and just because she 
hadn’t the strength to w'rite her name, you would let 
her wish fail. Of course I wrote it for her! Yes; I know 
what you call it. But what do I care what it is called, 
if I carried out her wish and gave Blair the money she 

378 


THE IRON WOMAN 


wanted him to have ? Now he has got it, and nobody can 
take it away from him.” 

‘‘My dear child, if he kept it, it would be stealing.” 

‘‘You can’t steal from your mother,” Nannie said, 
‘‘Mamma would be the first one to say so!” 

Mr. Ferguson looked over at his niece and shook his 
head; how were they to make her understand? ‘‘He 
can’t keep it, Nannie. When he understands that it isn’t 
his, he will simply give it back to the estate, and then 
it will come to you.” 

‘‘To me?” she said, astounded. And he explained 
that she was her stepmother’s residuary legatee. She 
looked blank, and he told her the meaning of the term. 

‘‘The estate is going to meet the bequests with a fair 
balance; and as that balance will come to you, this 
money you gave to Blair will be yours, too.” 

She had been standing, with Elizabeth’s pitying arms 
about her; but at the shock of his explanation she 
seemed to collapse. She sank down in a chair, panting. 
‘‘It wasn’t necessary! I could have just given it to 
him.” 

Later, when Robert Ferguson was walking home with 
his niece, he, too, said, grimly: ‘‘No; it ‘wasn’t neces¬ 
sary,’ as she says, poor child! She could have given it 
to him; just as she will give it to him, now. Well, well, 
to think of that mouse, Nannie, upsetting the lion’s 
plans!” 

Elizabeth was silent. 

‘‘What I can’t understand,” he ruminated, ‘‘is how 
that signature could pass at the bank; a girl like Nannie 
able to copy a signature so that a bank wouldn’t de¬ 
tect it!” 

“She has always copied Mrs. Maitland’s writing,” 
Elizabeth said; “that last week Mrs. Maitland said she 
could not tell the difference herself.” 

Robert Ferguson looked perfectly incredulous. ‘‘ It’s 
astounding!” he said; ‘‘and it would be impossible,—if 
379 


THE IRON WOMAN 


it hadn’t happened. Well, come along home with me, 
Elizabeth. I think I’d better tell you just how the 
matter stands, so that you can explain it to Blair. I 
don’t care to see him myself—if I can help it. But in 
the matter of transferring the money to the estate, w^e 
must keep Nannie’s name out of it, and I want you to 
tell him how he and I must patch it up.” 

‘‘When he returns it, I suppose the executors will 
give it at once to David?” she said. 

‘‘ Of course not. It will belong to the estate. Women 
have no financial moral sense!” 

“Oh!” Elizabeth said; and pondered. 

Just as he was pulling out his latch-key to open his 
front door, she spoke again* ‘‘If Nannie gives it back to 
him, Blair will have to send it to David, won’t he?” 

‘‘I can’t go into Mr. Blair Maitland’s ideals of honor,” 
her uncle said, dryly. ‘‘Legally, if Nannie chooses to 
make him a gift, he has a right to keep it.” 

She made no reply. She sat down at the library table 
opposite him, and listened without comment to the in¬ 
formation which he desired her to convey to Blair. 
But long before she got back to the hotel, Blair had 
had the information. 

Nannie, left to herself after that distressing interview, 
sat in the dusty desolation of Mrs. Maitland’s room, her 
face hidden in her hands. She needn't have done it. 
That was her first clear thought. The strain of that 
dreadful hour alone in the dining-room, with Death be¬ 
hind the locked door, had been unnecessary! As she 
realized how unnecessary, she felt a resentment that 
was almost anger at such a waste of pain. Then into 
the resentment crept a little fright. Mr. Ferguson's 
words about wrong-doing began to have meaning. ‘‘Of 
course it was against the law,” she told herself, ‘‘but 
it was not wrong,—^there is a difference.” It was in¬ 
credible to her that Mr. Ferguson did not see the dif¬ 
ference. ‘‘ Mamma wouldn’t have let him speak so to me, 
^8o 


THE IRON WOMAN 


if she’d been here,” she thought, and her lip trembled; 
“oh, I wish she hadn’t died,” she said; and cried softly 
for a minute or two. Then it occurred to her that she had 
better go to the River House and tell her brother the 
whole story. “If Mr. Ferguson is angry about it per¬ 
haps Blair had better pay the money back right off; of 
course I’il give it to him the minute it comes to me; but 
he will know what to do now.” 

She ran up-stairs to her own room, and began to dress 
to go out, but she was so nervous that her fingers were 
all thumbs; “I don’t want Elizabeth to tell him,” she 
said to herself; and tried to hurry, dropping her hat-pin 
and mislaying her gloves; “oh, where is my veil!” she 
said, frantically. 

She was just leaving her room when she heard Blair’s 
voice in the lower hall: “Nancy! Where are you?” 

“I’m coming,” she called back; and came running 
down-stairs. “Oh, Blair dear,” she said, “I want to see 
you so much!” By that time she was on the verge of 
tears, and the flush of worry in her cheeks made her so 
pretty that her brother looked at her appreciatively. 

“Black is mighty becoming to you, Nancy. Nannie 
dear, I have something to tell you. Come into the 
parlor!” His voice, as he put his arm around her and 
drew her into the room, had a ring in it which, in spite 
of her preoccupation, caught her attention. “ Sit down!” 
he commanded; and then, standing in front of her, his 
handsome face alert, he told her that he was not going to 
contest his mother’s will. “I pitched up a penny,” he 
said, gaily; “I was sick and tired of the uncertainty. 
‘Heads, I fight; tails, I cave.’ It came down tails,” he 
said, with a half-sheepish laugh. “Well, it will please 
Elizabeth if I don’t fight. I’ll go into business. I can 
get a partnership in Haines’s office. He is a stock¬ 
broker, you know.” 

Nannie’s attention flagged; in the nature of things 
she could not understand how important this decision 

J8i 


THE IRON WOMAN 


was, so she was not disturbed that it should have been 
made by the flip of a penny. Blair was apt to rely upon 
chance to make up his mind for him, and in regard to 
the will, heads or tails was as good a chance as any. In 
her own preoccupation, she had not realized that he had 
reached the reluctant conviction that in any effort to 
break the will, the legal odds would be against him. 
But if she had realized it she would have known that 
the probable hopelessness of litigation would not have 
helped him much in reaching a decision, so the penny 
judgment would not have surprised her, Blair, as he 
told her about it, was in great spirits. He had been 
entirely sincere in his reluctance to take any step which 
might indicate contempt for his mother’s late (if ade¬ 
quate) repentance; so now, though a little rueful about 
the money, he was distinctly relieved that his taste was 
not going to be sentimentally offended. He meant to 
live on what his mother had given him until he made a 
fortune for himself. For he was going to make a fortune! 
He was going to stand on his own legs. Fie was going 
to buy Elizabeth’s interest in him and his affairs, buy 
even her admiration by making this sacrifice of not fight¬ 
ing for his rights! He was full of the fervor of it all 
as he stood there telling his sister of his decision. When 
he had finished, he waited for her outburst of approval. 

But she only nodded nervously; “ Blair, Mr. Ferguson 
says you’ve got to give back that money; Mamma’s 
check, you know?” 

''WhatV Blair said; he was standing by the piano, 
and as he spoke he struck a crashing octave; “what on 
earth do you mean?” 

• “Well, he—I—” It had not occurred to Nannie that 
it would be difficult to tell Blair, but suddenly it seemed 
impossible. “ You see. Mamma didn’t exactly—sign 
the check.” 

“What are you talking about?” Blair said, suddenly 
attentive. 

382 


THE IRON WOMAN 


*‘She wanted you to have the money/' Nannie began, 
faintly. 

“Of course she did; but what do you mean about 
not signing the check ‘exactly’?” In his bewilderment, 
which was not yet alarm, he put his arm afound her, 
laughing: “ Nancy, what is all this stuff ?” 

“ I did for her,” Nannie said. 

“Did what?” 

“Signed it.” 

“Nannie, I don’t understand you; do you mean that 
mother made you indorse that certificate? Nancy, do 
try to be clear!” He was uneasy now; perhaps some 
ridiculous legal complication had arisen. “Some of 
their everlasting red tape! Fortunately, I’ve got the 
money all right,” he said to himself, dryly. 

“She wrote the first part of it,” Nannie began, stam¬ 
mering with the difficulty of explaining what had seemed 
so simple; “ but she hadn’t the strength to sign her name, 
so I—did it for her.” 

Her brother looked at her aghast. “Did she tell you 
to?” 

“No; she . . . was dead.” 

“Good God!” he said. The shock of it made him feel 
faint. He sat down, too dumfounded for speech. 

“I had to, you see,” Nannie explained, breathlessly; 
she was very much frightened, far more frightened than 
when she had told Mr. Ferguson. “I had to, because— 
because Mamma couldn’t. She was . . . not alive.” 

Blair suddenly put his hands over his face. “You 
forged mother’s name!” His consternation was like a 
blow; she cringed away from it: “No; I—just wrote it.” 

Nannie P* 

“Somebody had to,” she insisted, faintly. 

Blair sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down 
the room. “This is awful. I haven’t a cent!” 

“Oh,” she said, with a gasp, “as far as that goes it 
doesn’t make any difference, except about time. Mr. 

25 383 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Ferguson said it didn’t make any difference. I’ll give it 
all back to you as soon as I get it. Only you’ll have to 
give it back first.” 

“Nannie,” he said, “for Heaven’s sake, tell me straight^ 
the whole thing.’ 

She told him as well as she could; speaking with that 
minute elaboration of the unimportant so characteristic 
of minds like hers and so maddening to the listener. 
Blair, in a fury of anxiety, tried not to interrupt, but 
when she reached Mr. Ferguson’s assertion that the 
certificate had been meant for David Richie, the worried 
color suddenly dropped out of his face. 

‘ ‘ For —him f N annie! ’ ’ 

“ No, oh no! It wasn’t for David, except just at first— 
before—not when—” She was perfectly incoherent. 
“Let me tell you,” she besought him. 

“ If I thought she had meant it for him, I would send 
it to him before night! Tell me everything,” he said, 
passionately. 

“I’m trying to,” Nannie stammered, “but you—you 
keep interrupting me. I’ll tell you how it was, if you’ll 
just let me, and not keep interrupting. Perhaps she did 
plan to give it to David. Mr. Ferguson said she planned 
to more than two years ago. And even when she was 
sick Mr. Ferguson thinks she still meant to.” 

“I’ll fight that damned will to my last breath!” he 
burst out. Following the recoil of disgust at the idea of 
taking anything—“anything else "'—^that belonged to 
David Richie, came the shock of feeling that he had 
been tricked into the sentimentality of forgiveness. “I’ll 
break that will if I take it through every court in the 
land!” 

“But Blair! Mamma didn't mean it for him at the 
last. Don’t you see? Oh, Blair, listen! Don’t be so— 
terrible; you frighten me,” Nannie said, squeezing her 
hands hard together in the effort to keep from crying. 
“Listen: she told me on Wednesday, the day before she 
384 


THE IRON WOMAN 


died, that she wanted to give you a present. She said^ 
'I must give him a check,’ You see, she was beginning 
to realize how wrong her will was; but of course she 
didn’t know she was going to die or she would have 
changed it.” 

“That doesn’t follow,” Blair said. 

“Then came the last day”—Nannie could not keep 
the tears back any longer; “the last day; but it was too 
late to do anything about the will. Why, she could 
hardly speak, it was so near the—the end. And then all 
of a sudden she remembered that certificate. And she 
opened her eyes and looked at me with such relief, as if 
she said to herself, ‘I can give him that!’ And she told 
me to bring it to her. And she kept saying,‘Blair— 
Blair—Blair.’ And oh, it was pitiful to see her hurry so 
to write your name! And then she wrote it; but before 
she could sign her name, her hand sort of—fell. And she 
tried so hard to raise it so she could sign it; but she 
couldn’t. And she kept muttering that she had written 
it ‘many times, many times’; I couldn’t just hear what 
she said; she sort of—mumbled, you know. Oh, it was 
dreadful!” 

“And then?” Blair said, breathlessly. Nannie was 
speechless. 

''Then?'' he insisted, trembling. 

“Then . . . she died,” Nannie whispered. 

“But the signature! The signature! How—” 

“In the night, I—” She stopped; terror spread over 
her face as wind spreads over a pool. “In the night, at 
three o’clock, I came down-stairs and—” She stopped, 
panting for breath. He put his arm around her sooth¬ 
ingly. 

“Try and tell me, dear. I didn’t mean to be savage.” 
His face had reiaxed. Of course it was dreadful, this 
thing Nannie had done; but it was not so dreadful as the 
thought that he had taken money intended for David 
Richie, When he had quieted he**, and she was able to 

385 


THE IRON WOMAN 


speak again, she told him just what she had done there 
in the dining-room at three o’clock in the morning. 

“But didn’t you know it was wrong?” he said; “that 
it was a criminal offense!” He could not keep the dis¬ 
may out of his voice. 

“I did it for Mamma’s sake and yours,” she said, 
quailing. 

“Well,” he said, and in his relief at knowing that he 
need not think of David Richie, he was almost gay— 
“well, you mustn’t tell any one else your motive for 
committing a—” Nannie suddenly burst out crying. 
“ Mamma wouldn’t say that to me,” she said, “Mamma 
was never cross to me in her whole life 1 But you and Mr. 
Ferguson—” she could not go on, for tears. He was 
instantly contrite and tender; but even as he tried tc 
comfort her, he frowned; of course in the end he would 
suffer no loss, but the immediate situation was delicate 
and troublesome. “I’ll have to go and see Mr. Fergu¬ 
son, I suppose,” he said. “ You mustn’t speak of it to 
any one, dear; things really might get serious, if any¬ 
body but Mr. Ferguson knew about it. Don’t tell a 
soul; promise me?” 

She promised, and Blair left her very soberly. The 
matter of the mon^y was comparatively unimportant; 
it was his, subject only to the formality of its transfer to 
the estate. But that David Richie should have been 
connected even indirectly with his personal affairs was 
exquisitely offensive to him—and Elizabeth knew about 
it! “She’s probably sitting there by the window, look¬ 
ing like that robin, and thinking about him,” he said to 
himself angrily, as he hurried back to the River House. 
There seemed to be no escape from David Richie. “I 
feel Hke a dog with a dead hen hanging round his neck,” 
he said to h^’mself, in grimly humorous disgust; “I 
can’t get away from him!” 

He found his wife in their parlor at the hotel, but she 
was not in that listless attitude that he had grown to 
386 


THE IRON WOMAN 


expect,—^huddled in a chair, her chin in her hand, her 
eyes watching the slow roll of the river. Instead she was 
alert. 

“ Blair!’' she said, almost before he had closed the dooi 
behind him; “ 1 have something to tell you.” 

“I know about it,” he said, gravely; “I have seen 
Nannie.” 

Elizabeth looked at him in silence. 

“Would you have supposed that Nannie, Nannie, of 
all people! would have had the courage to do such a 
thing?” he said, nervousty; it occurred to him that if he 
could keep the conversation on Nannie’s act, perhaps 
that—^that name could be avoided. “Think of the mere 
courage of it, to say nothing of its criminality.” 

“She didn’t know she was doing wrong.” 

“No; of course not. But it’s a mighty unpleasant 
matter.” 

“Uncle says it can be arranged so that her name 
needn’t come into it.” 

“Of course,” he agreed. 

Elizabeth did not speak, but the look in her eyes was a 
demand. 

“ It’s going to be rather tough for us, to wait until she 
hands it over to me,” Blair said. 

“To your 

The moment had come! He came and knelt beside 
her, and kissed her; she did not repulse him. She con¬ 
tinued to look at him steadily. Then very gently, she 
said, “And when Nannie gives it to you, what will you 
do with it?” 

Blair drew in his breath as if bracing himself for a 
struggle. Then he got on his feet, pulled up one of the 
big, plush-covered arm-chairs, took out his cigarette- 
case, and struck a match. His hand shook. “ Do with 
it? Why, invest it. I am going into business, Eliza¬ 
beth. I decided to this morning. If you would care 
to know why I have given up the idea of contesting the 

387 


THE IRON WOMAN 


will, I’ll tell you. I don’t want to bore you,” he ended, 
wistfully. Apparently she did not hear him. 

“Did Nannie tell you that that money was meant for 
a hospital?” 

Blair sat up straight, and the match, burning slowly, 
scorched his fingers. He threw it down with an exclama^ 
tion; his face was red with his effort to speak quietly. 
“She told me of your uncle’s misunderstanding of the 
situation. There is no possible doubt that my mother 
meant the money for me. If I thought otherwise—” 

“ If you will talk to Uncle Robert, you will think other¬ 
wise.” 

“Of course I’ll go and see Mr. Ferguson; I shall 
have to, to arrange about the transfer of the money to the 
estate, so that it can come back tc^me through the legiti¬ 
mate channel of a gift from Nannie; in other words, she 
will carry out my mother’s purpose legally, instead— 
poor old Nannie! of carrying it out criminally, as she 
tried to do. But I won’t go to your uncle to discuss 
my mother’s purpose, Elizabeth. I am perfectly satis¬ 
fied that she meant to give me that money.” 

She was silent. 

“Of course,” he went on, “I will hear what Mr, 
Ferguson has to say about this idea of his—and yours, 
too, apparently,” he ended, bitterly. 

“Yes,” she said, “and mine.” The words seemed to 
tingle as she spoke them. 

“Oh, Elizabeth!” he cried, “aren^t you ever going to 
care for me ? You actually think me capable of keeping 
money intended for—some one else!” 

His indignation was too honest to be ignored. “I 
suppose that you believe it is yours,” she said with an 
effort; “but you believe it because you don’t know the 
facts. When you see Uncle Robert, you will not believe 
it.” And with that meager acknowledgment of his 
honesty he had to be content. 

They did not speak of it again during that long dull 
388 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Sunday afternoon, but each knew that the other thought 
of nothing else. The red September sun was sinking into 
a smoky haze on the other side of the river, when Blair 
suddenly took up his hat and went out. It had occurred 
to him that if he could correct Robert Ferguson’s mis¬ 
apprehension, Elizabeth would correct hers. He would 
not wait for business hours to clear himself in her eyes; 
he would go and see her uncle at once. It was dusk 
when he pushed into Mr. Ferguson’s library, almost in 
advance of the servant who announced him: “Mr. 
Ferguson!” he said peremptorily; “Nannie has told me. 
And Elizabeth gave me your message. I have come to 
say that the transfer shall be made at once. My one wish 
is that Nannie’s name may not be connected with it in any 
possible way—of course she is as innocent as a child.” 

“It can be arranged easily enough,” the older man 
said; he did not rise from his desk, or offer his hand. 

“But,” Blair burst out, “what I came especially to 
say w’-as that I hear you are under the impression that 
my mother did not, at the end, mean me to have that 
money?” 

“I am under that impression. But,” Robert Fergu¬ 
son added, contemptuously, “you need not be too upset 
Nannie will give it back to you.” 

“I am not in the least upset!” Blair retorted; “but 
whether I’m upset or not, is not the question. The 
question is, did my mother change her mind about her 
will, and try to make up for it in this way? I believe, 
from all that I know now, that she did. But I have 
come to ask you whether there is anything that I don’t 
know; anything Nannie hasn’t told me, or that she 
doesn’t understand, which leads you to feel as you do ?” 

“You had better sit down.” 

“ If it was just Nannie’s idea, I will break the will!” 

“You had better sit down,” Mr. Ferguson repeated, 
coldly, “and I’ll tell you the whole business.” 

Blair sat down; his hat, which he had forgotten to 
.^89 


THE IRON WOMAN 


take off, was on the back of his head; he leaned forward, 
his fingers white on a cane swinging between his knees, 
he did not look at Elizabeth’s uncle, but his eyes showed 
that he did not lose a word he said. At the end of the 
statement—^brief, fair, spoken without passion or appar¬ 
ent prejudice—^the tension relaxed and his face cleared, 
he drew a great breath of relief. 

“ It seems to me,” Robert Ferguson ended, “that there 
can be no doubt of your mother’s intention.” 

“ I agree with you,” Blair said, triumphantly, “there is 
no possible doubt! She called for the certificate and 
wrote my name on it. What more do you want than 
that to prove her intention?” 

“You have a right to your opinion,” Mr. Ferguson said, 
“and I have a right to mine. I cannot see that either 
opinion affects the situation. You will, as a matter of 
common honesty, return this money +o the estate. What 
Nannie will ultimately do with it, is not my affair. It 
is between you and her. I can’t see that we need dis* 
cuss the matter further.” He took up his pen with a 
gesture of dismissal. 

Blair’s face reddened as if it had been slapped, but 
he did not rise. “ I want you to know, sir, that while my 
sister’s act is, of course, entirely indefensible, and I shall 
immediately return the money which she tried to secure 
for me, I shall, nevertheless, allow her to give it back to 
me, because it is my conviction that, by my dying 
mother’s wish, it belongs tome; not to—^to any one 
else.” 

“Your convictions have always served your wishes. 
I will bid you good-evening.” 

For an instant Blair hesitated; then, still scarlet with 
anger, took his departure. Mr. Ferguson’s belief that he 
was capable of keeping money intended for — for any 
one else, was an insult; “an abominable insult!” he 
told himself. And it was Elizabeth’s belief, too! He 
drew in his breath in a groan. “She thinks I am dis- 

390 


THE IRON WOMAN 


honorable,” he said. Well, certainly that sneak, Richie, 
would feel he was avenged if he could know how cruel she 
was; “damn him,” Blair said, softly. 

He thought to himself that he could not go back and 
tell Elizabeth what her uncle had said; he could not re¬ 
peat the insult! Some time, when he was calmer, he 
would tell her quietly that he had been wronged, that 
she herself had wronged him. But just now he could 
not talk to her; he was too angry and too miserable. 

So,'walking slowly in the foggy dusk that was pungent 
T^ith the smoke of bonfires on the flats, he suddenlji 
wheeled about and went in the other direction. “I’ll 
go and have supper with Nannie,” he thought; “I’m 
afraid she is dreadfully worried and unhappy,—^and all 
on my account, dear old Nancy!” 


CHAPTER XXXIII 


*‘Do you think/’ Robert Ferguson wrote Mrs. Richie 
about the middle of September—“do you think you 
could come to Mercer for a little while and look after 
Nannie ? The poor child is so unhappy and so incapa¬ 
ble of making up her mind about herself that I am un¬ 
easy about her.” 

“Of course I will go,” Mrs. Richie told her son. 

David had come down to the little house on the sea¬ 
shore to spend Sunday with her, and in the late afternoon 
they were sitting out on the sand in a sunny, sheltered 
spot watching the slow, smooth heave of the quiet sea. 
David’s shoulder was against her knee, his pipe had gone 
out, and he was looking with lazy eyes at the slipping 
sparkle of sunshine on the scarcely perceptible waves; 
sometimes he lifted his marine glasses to follow a sail 
gleaming like a white wing against the opalescent east. 

“I wonder why Nannie is unhappy,” he ruminated; 
“she was never, poor little Nannie! capable of appre¬ 
ciating Mrs. Maitland; so I don’t suppose she loved her?” 

“She loved her as much as she could,” Mrs. Richie 
said; “and that is all any of us can do, David. But 
she misses her. If a mountain went out of your land¬ 
scape, wouldn’t you feel rather blank? Well, Nannie’s 
mountain has gone. Yes; Ill go and stay with her, 
poor child, for a while, and perhaps bring her back for 
a fortnight with us—if you wouldn’t mind?” 

“Of course I w^ouldn’t mind. Bring her along.” 

“I wonder if you could close this house for me?” she 
said; “I don’t like to shut it up now and leave you 
392 


THE IRON WOMAN 


without a roof over your head in case you had a chance 
to take a day off.” 

“Of course I can close it,” he said; and added that 
if he couldn’t shut up a bandbox of a summer cottage 
he w^ould be a pretty useless member of society. “I’ll 
come down the first chance I get in the next fortnight. 
. . . Mother, I suppose you will see— herP* 

Mrs. Richie gave him a startled look. “I suppose I 
shall.” 

He was silent for several minutes. She did not dare to 
help him by a word. Then, as if he had wrenched the 
question up by the roots, torn it out of his sealed 
heart, he said, “Do you suppose she cares for him?” 

It was the first time in these later speechless months 
that he had turned to her. Steadying herself on that 
advice of Robert Ferguson’s: ^ when he does blurt it out 
don’t get excited,’ she answered, calmly enough, “I 
don’t know.” 

He struck his heel down into the sand, then pulled out 
his knife and began to clean the bowl of his pipe. The 
blade trembled in his hand. 

“ Until I saw her in May,” he said, “ I suppose I really 
thought— I didn’t formulate it, but I suppose I 
thought ...” 

“What?” 

“That somehow I would get her yet.” 

“Oh, David!” she breathed. 

He glanced at her cynically. “Don’t get agitated, 
Matema. That May visit cured me. I know I won’t. 
I know she doesn’t care for me. But I can’t tell whether 
she cares for him.” 

“I hope she does,” she said. 

At which he laughed: “Do you expect me to agree 
to that?” 

“David, think what you are saying!” 

“My dear mother, have you been under the impres¬ 
sion that I am a saint?” he said, dryly. “If so let me 
393 


THE IRON WOMAN 


correct you. I am not. Yes, until I went out there in 
May I always had the feeling that I would get her, some¬ 
how, some time.” He paused; his knife scraped the 
bowl of his pipe until the fresh wood showed under the 
blade. “I don’t know that I ever exactly admitted 
it to myself; but I realize now that the feeling was 
there.” 

“You shock me-very much,” she said; and leaning 
against her knee he felt the quiver that ran through her. 

“ I have shocked myself several times in the last few 
years,” he said, briefly. 

His mother was silent. Suddenly he began to talk: 

“At first—I mean when it happened; I thought she 
would send for me, and I would take her away from him, 
and then kill him.” Her broken exclamation made him 
laugh. “Don’t worry; 1 was terribly young in those 
days. I got over all that. It was only just at first; it 
was the everlasting human impulse. The cave-dweller 
had it, I suppose, when somebody stole his woman. 
But it’s only the body that wants to kill. The mind 
knows better. The mind knows that life can be a lot 
better punishment than death. I knew he’d get his 
punishment and I was willing to wait for it. I thought 
that when she left him, his hell would be as hot as mine. 
I took it for granted that she would leave him. I 
thought there would be a divorce, and then”—^his voice 
was smothered to the breaking-point; “then I would get 
her. Or I would get her without a divorce.” 

“David!” 

He did not seem to hear her; his elbows were on his 
knees, his chin on his two fists; he spoke as if to him¬ 
self; “Well; she didn’t leave him. I suppose she 
couldn’t forgive me. Curious, isn’t it? how the mind 
can believe two entirely contradictory things at the same 
time: I realized she couldn’t forgive me,—yet I 
still thought I would get her, somehow. Meantime, I 
consoled myself with the reflection that even if she hated 


THE IRON WOMAN 


me for having pushed her into his arms, she hated him 
worse. 1 thought that where I had been stabbed once, 
he would be stabbed a thousand times." David spoke 
with that look of primitive joy which must have been 
on the face of the cave-dweller when he felt the blood 
of his enemy spurt warm between his fingers. 

Helena Richie gave a little cry and shrank back. 
These were the thoughts that her boy had built up 
betw’een them in these silent years! He gave her a 
faintly amused glance. 

“ Yes, I had my dreams. Bad dreams you would call 
them, Matema. Now I don’t dream any more. After I 
saw her in May, I got all over such nonsense. I realized 
that perhaps she . . . loved him." 

His mother was trembling. “It frightens me that 
you should have had such thoughts," she said. She 
actually looked frightened; her leaf-brown eyes were 
wide with terror. 

Her son nuzzled his cheek against her hand; “Bless 
your dear heart 1 it frightens you, because you can’t un¬ 
derstand. Matema, there are several things you can’t 
understand—and I shouldn’t like it if you could!" he 
said, his face sobering wdth that reverent look which a 
man gives only to his mother; “There is the old human 
instinct, that existed before laws or morals or anything 
else, the man’s instinct to keep his woman. And next 
to that, there is the realization that when it comes to 
what you call morals, there is a morality higher than 
the respectability you good people care so much about— 
the morality of nature. But of course you don’t un¬ 
derstand," he said again, with a short laugh. 

“I understand a good many things, David." 

“Oh, well, I didn't mean to talk about it," he said, 
sighing; “I don’t know what started me; and—and 
I m not howling, you know. I was only wondering 
whether you thought she had come to care for him?" 

“ I don't know," she said, faintly. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


He snapped his knife shut. “ Neither do I. But I guess 
she does. Nature is a big thing, Matema. When a girl’s 
loyalty comes up against that, it hasn’t much show; es¬ 
pecially when nature is assisted by behavior like mine. 
Yes, I guess by this time she loves him. I’ll never get her.” 

“Oh, David,” his mother said, tremulously, “if you 
could only meet some nice, sweet girl, and—” 

“Nice girl?” he said, smiling. “They’re scarce, 
Matema, they’re scarce. But I mean to get married 
one of these days. A man in my trade ought to be 
married. I sha’n’t bother to look for one of those 
‘sweet girls,’ however. I’ve got over my fondness for 
sugar. No more sentimentalities for me, thank you. I 
shall marry on strictly common-sense principles: a good 
housekeeper, who has good sense, and good looks—” 

“And a good temper, I hope,” Mrs. Richie said, al¬ 
most with temper herself; and who can blame her.^— 
he had been so cruelly injured! The sweetness, the si¬ 
lent, sunny honesty of the boy, the simple belief in the 
goodness of his fellow-creatures, had been changed to 
this! Oh, she could almost hate the girl who had done 
it! “A good temper is more important than anything 
else,” she said, hotly. 

Instantly the dull cynicism of his face flashed into 
anger. “Elizabeth’s temper,—I suppose that is what 
you are referring to; her temper was not responsible 
for what happened. It was my assinine conceit.” 

She winced. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said. 
He was silent. “But it is terrible to have you so hard, 
David.” 

“Hard? I? I am a mush of amiability. Come 
now! I oughtn’t to have made you low-spirited. It’s 
all an old story. I was only telling you how I felt at 
first. As for bad thoughts,—I haven’t any thoughts 
now, good or bad! I am a most exemplary person. I 
don’t know why I slopped over to you, anyhow. So 
don’t think of it again. Matema! Can you see that 
396 


THE IRON WOMAN 


sail?” He was looking through his glasses; “it’s the 
eleventh since we came out here.” 

“But David, that you should think—” 

“Oh, but I don’t think any more,” he declared, watch¬ 
ing the flitting white gleam on the horizon; “I always 
avoid thinking, nowadays. That’s why I am such a 
promising young medical man. I’m all right and per¬ 
fectly happy. I’ll hold my base, I promise you! That’s 
a brig, Matema. Do you know the difference between a 
brig and a schooner? I bet you don’t.” 

Apparently the moment of confidence was over; he 
had opened his heart and let her see the blackness and 
bleakness; and now he was closing it again. She was 
silent. David thrust his pipe into his pocket and turned 
to help her to rise; but she had hidden her face in her 
hands. “It is my fault,” she said, with a gasp; “it 
must be my fault 1 Oh, David, have I made you wicked ? 
If you had had a different mother—” Instantly he 
was ashamed of hirnself. 

“Matema! I am a brute to you,” he said. He flung 
his arm around her, and pressed his face against hers; 
“I wish somebody would kick me. You made me 
wicked? You are the only thing that has kept me 
anyways straight! Mother—I’ve been decent; your 
goodness has saved me from—several things. I want 
you to know that. I would have gone right straight to 
the devil if it hadn’t been for your goodness. As for 
how I felt about Elizabeth, it was just a mood; don’t 
think of it again.” 

“But you said,” she whispered; ''without a divorce.” 

“Well, I—I didn’t mean it, I guess,” he comforted her; 
“anyhow, the jig is up, dear. Even if I had a bad 
moment now and then in the first year, nothing came of 
it Oh, mother, what a beast I am!” He was pressing 
his handkerchief against her tragic eyes. “Your fault? 
Your only fault is being so perfect that you can’t under¬ 
stand a poor critter like me!” 

397 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“I do understand. I do understand.” 

In spite of himself, David laughed. “You! That's 
rich.” He looked at her with his old, good smile, tender 
and inarticulate. “What would I have done without 
you ? You’ve stood by and put up with my cussedness 
through these three devilish years. It’s almost three 
years, you know, and yet I—I don’t seem to get over it 
—Oh, I’m a perfect girl! How can you put up with 
me?” He laughed again, and hugged her. “Mother, 
sometimes I almost wish you weren’t so good.” 

“David,” she burst out passionately, “I am—” She 
stopped, trembling. 

“ I take it back,” he apologized, smiling; “ I seem bent 
on shocking you to-day. You can be as good as you 
want. Only, once in a while you do seem a little remote. 
Elizabeth used to say she was afraid of you.” 

“Of mer 

“Well, an angel like you never could quite understand 
her,” he said, soberly. 

His mother was silent; then she said in a low voice: 

“ I am not an angel; but perhaps I haven’t understood 
her. I can understand love, but not hate. Elizabeth 
never loved you; she doesn’t know the meaning of love.” 

“You are mistaken, dear,” he said, gently. 

They went back to the house very silently; David’s 
confidences were over, but they left their mark on his 
mother’s face. She showed the strain of that talk even a 
week later when she started on her kindly mission to 
cheer poor Nannie. On the hazy September morning, 
when Robert Ferguson met her in the big, smoky station 
at Mercer, there were new lines of care in her face. Her 
landlord, as he persisted in calling himself, noticed them, 
and was instantly cross; crossness being his way of ex¬ 
pressing anxiety. 

“ You look tired,” he scolded, as he opened the carriage 
door for her, “you’ve got to rest at my house and have 
something to eat before you go to Nannie’s; besides, you 

398 


THE IRON WOMAN 


don’t suppose I got you on here just to cheer her ? You’ve 
got to cheer me, too! It’s enough to give a man melan¬ 
cholia to live next to that empty house of yours, and you 
owe it to me to be pleasant—if you can be pleasant,” 
he barked. 

But his barking was strangely mild. His words were 
as rough as ever, but he spoke with a sort of eager gentle¬ 
ness, as if he were trying to make his voice soft enough 
for some unuttered pitifulness. She was so pleased to 
see him, and to hear the kind, gruff voice, that for a min¬ 
ute she forgot her anxiety about David, and laughed. 
And when her eyes crinkled in that old, gay way, it 
seemed to Robert Ferguson, looking at her with yearn¬ 
ing, as if Mercer, and the September haze, and the grimy 
old depot hack were suddenly illuminated. 

” Oh, these children 1” he said; ” they are worrying me 
to death. Nannie won’t budge out of that old house; 
it will have to be sold over her head, to get her into a 
decent locality. Elizabeth isn’t well, but the Lord only 
knows what’s the matter with her. The doctor says 
she’s all right, but she’s as grumpy as—^her uncle; you 
can’t get a word out of her. And Blair has been specu¬ 
lating,”—he was so cross that, when at his own door 
he put out his hand to help her from the carriage, she 
patted his arm, and said, “Come; cheer up!” 

At which, smiling all over his face, he growled at her that 
it was a pretty thing to expect a man to cheer up, with 
an empty house on his hands. ” You seem to think I’m 
made of money! You take the house now; don’t wait 
till that callow doctor is ready to settle down here. If 
you’ll move in now. I’ll cheer up—and give Elizabeth the 
rent for pin-money.” He was really cheerful by this 
time just because he was able to scold her, but behind his 
scolding there was always this new gentleness. Later, 
when he spoke again of the house, her face fell. 

” I am doubtful about our coming to Mercer.” 

“Doubtful?” he said; “what’s all this? There never 
2e 399 


THE IRON WOMAN 


was a woman yet who knew her own mind for a day at a 
time—except Mrs. Maitland. You told me that David 
was coming here next spring, and Fve been keeping this 
house for you; Fve lost five months’ rent”—there was 
a worried note in his voice; “what in thunder?” he 
demanded. 

Mrs, Richie sighed. ” I don’t suppose I ought to tell 
you, but I can’t seem to help it. I discovered the other 
day that David is not heart-whole, yet. He is dread¬ 
fully bitter; dreadfully! I don’t believe it’s prudent 
for him to live in Mercer. Do you ? He would be con¬ 
stantly seeing Elizabeth,” 

She had had her breakfast, and they had gone into 
Mr. Ferguson’s garden so that he might throw some 
crumbs to the pigeons and smoke his morning cigar before 
taking her to the Maitland house. They were sitting 
now in the long arbor, where the Isabella grapes were 
ripening sootily in the sparse September sunshine which 
sifted down between the yellowing leaves, and touched 
Mrs. Richie’s brown hair; Robert Ferguson saw, with a 
pang, that there were some white threads in the soft 
locks. His eyes stung, so he barked as gruffly as he 
could. 

‘‘Well, suppose he does see her? You can’t wrap him 
up in cotton batting for the rest of his life. That’s what 
you’ve always tried to do, you hen with one chicken! 
For the Lord’s sake, let him alone. Let him take his 
medicine like any other man. After he gets over the 
nasty taste of it, he’ll find there’s sugar in the world yet; 
just as I did. Only I hope he won’t be so long about it 
as I was.” 

She sighed, and her soft eyes filled. “ Lut you don’t 
know how he talked. Oh, I can’t help thinking it must 
be my fault! If he had had another kind of a mother, 
if his own mother had lived—” 

‘‘Own grandmother!” said Robert Ferguson, disgust¬ 
edly; ‘‘the only trouble with you as a mother, is that 
400 


THE IRON WOMAN 


youVe been too good to the cub. If you’d knocked his 
head against the wall once or twice, you’d have made a 
man of him. My dear, you really must not be a goose, 
you know. It’s the one thing I can’t stand. Helena,” 
he interrupted himself, chuckling, “you will be pleased 
to know that Cherry-pie (begging her pardon!) thinks 
that David will ultimately console himself by falling in 
love with Nannie! ‘ It would be very nice,’ she says.” 

They both laughed, then David’s mother sighed' 
“But just think how delightful to feel that life is as 
simple as that,” she said. 

Robert Ferguson picked a grape, and took careful 
aim at a pigeon; “Helena,” he said, in a low voice, 
“before you see Nannie, perhaps I ought to tell you 
something. I wouldn’t, only I know she will, and you 
ought to understand it. Can you keep a secret?” 

“I can,” Mrs. Richie said briefly. 

“I believe it,” he said, with a sudden dryness. Then 
he told her the story of the certificate. 

“What! Nannie forged? NannieT* 

“We don’t use that word; it isn’t pretty. But that’s 
what it amounts to, of course. And that’s where David’s 
money went.” 

“I suppose Mrs. Maitland changed her mind at the 
last,” Mrs. Richie said; “well. I’m glad she did. It 
would have been too cruel if she hadn’t given something 
to Blair.” 

“I don’t think she did,” he declared; “changing her 
mind wasn’t her style; she wasn’t one of your weak 
womanish creatures. She wouldn’t have said she was 
coming to live in Mercer, and then tried to back out 
of it! No, she simply wrote Blair’s name by mistake. 
Her mind wandered constantly in those last days. And 
seeing what she had done, she didn’t indorse it.” 

Mrs. Richie looked doubtful. “I think she meant it 
for him.” 

Robert Ferguson laughed grimly, **l think she 
401 


THE IRON WOMAN 


didn't; but you’ll be a great comfort to Nannie. Poor 
Nannie! She is unhappy, but not in the least repentant. 
She insists that she did right! Would you have supposed 
that a girl of her age could be so undeveloped, morally?” 

“She’s only undeveloped legally,” she amended; “and 
what can you expect? What chance has she had to 
develop in any way?” 

“She had the chance of living with one of the finest 
women I ever knew,” he said, stiffly, and paused for 
their usual wrangle about Mrs. Maitland. As they rose 
to go indoors, he looked at his guest, and shook his head. 
“Oh, Helena, how conceited you are!” 

“ I ? Conceited ?” she said, blankly. 

“You think you are a better judge than I am,” he 
complained. 

“Nonsense!” she said, blushing charmingly; but she 
insisted on walking down to Nannie’s, instead of letting 
him take her in the carriage; a carriage is not a good 
place to ward off a proposal. 

At the Maitland house she found poor Nannie wan¬ 
dering vaguely about in the garret. “I am putting 
away Mamma’s clothes,” she said, helplessly. But a 
minute later she yielded, with tears of relief, to Mrs- 
Richie’s placid assumption of authority: 

“I am going to stay a week with you, and to-morrow 
I’ll tell you what to do with things. Just now you must 
sit down and talk to me.” 

And Nannie sat down, with a sigh of comfort. There 
were so many things she wanted to say to some one who- 
v/ould understand! “And you do understand,” she said, 
sobbing a little. “Oh, I am so lonely without Mamma! 
She and I alwa^rs understood each other. You know 
she meant the money for Blair, don’t you, Mrs. Richie ? 
Mr. Ferguson won’t believe me!” 

“Yes; I am sure she did,” Mrs. Richie said, heartily; 
“but dear, you ought not to have—” 

Nannie, comforted, said: “ Well, perhaps not; consider- 
402 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ing that 1 can give it to him. But I didn't know that, 
you know, when I did it." Pretty much all that day, 
poor Nannie poured out her full little heart to her kind 
listener; they sat down together at the office-dining¬ 
room table—at the head of which stood a chair that no 
one ever dreamed of occupying; and Harris shuffled 
about as he had for nearly thirty years, serving coarse 
food on coarse china, and taking a personal interest in 
the conversation. After dinner they went into Nannie’s 
parlor that smelt of soot, where the little immortal canvas 
still hung in its gleaming gold frame near the door, and 
the cut glass of the great chandeliers sparkled faintly 
through slits in the old brown paper-muslin covers. 
Sometimes, as they talked, the house would shake, and 
Nannie’s light voice be drowned in the roar of a passing 
train whose trail of smoke brushed against the windows 
like feathers of darkness. But Nannie gave no hint that 
she would ever go away and leave the smoke and noise, 
and just at first Mrs. Richie made no such suggestion. 
She did nothing but infold the vague, frightened, un¬ 
happy girl in her own tranquillity. Sometimes she lured 
her out to walk or drive, and once she urged her to ask 
Elizabeth and Blair to come to supper. 

“Oh, Blair won’t come while you are here!’’ Nannie 
said, simply; and the color came into David’s mother’s 
face. “I know,’’ Nannie went on, “that Elizabeth 
thinks Mamma meant that money for David. And she 
is not pleased because Mr. Ferguson won’t make the 
executors give it to him.’’ 

Mrs. Richie laughed. “Well, that is very foolish in 
Elizabeth; nobody could give your mother’s money to 
David. I must straighten that out with Elizabeth.’’ 

But she did not have a chance to do so; Elizabeth as 
well as Blair preferred not to come to the old house while 
David’s mother was there. And Mrs. Richie, unable 
to persuade Nannie to go back to Philadelphia with her, 
stayed on, in the kindness of her heart, for still another 


THE IRON WOMAN 


week. When she finally fixed a day for her return, she 
said to herself that at least Blair and Elizabeth would 
not be prevented by her presence from doing what they 
could to cheer Nannie. 

“But is she going to live on in that doleful house for¬ 
ever?” Robert Ferguson protested. 

“She’s like a poor little frightened snail,” Helena 
Richie said. “ You don’t realize the shock to her of that 
night when she—she tried to do what she thought Mrs. 
Maitland wanted to have done. She is scared still. She 
just creeps in and out of that dingy front door, or about 
those awful, silent rooms. It will take time to bring her 
into the sunshine.” 

“Helena,” he said, abruptly—she and Nannie had had 
supper with him and were just going home; Nannie had 
gone up-stairs to put on her hat. “Helena, I’ve been 
thinking a good deal about your cruelty to me.” 

She laughed: “Oh, you are impossible!” 

“No, I’m only permanent. Don’t laugh; just listen 
to me.” He was evidently nervous; the old friendly 
bullying had been put aside; he was very grave, and was 
plainly finding it difficult to say what he wanted to say: 
“ I don’t know what your reason is for refusing me, but 
I know it isn’t a good reason. You are fond of me, and 
yet you keep on saying ‘no’ in this exasperating way;— 
upon my word,” he interrupted himself, despairingly, “I 
could shake you, sometimes, it is so exasperating! You 
like me, well enough; but you won’t marry me.” 

“No, I won’t,” she assured him, gently. 

“It is so unreasonable of you,” he said, simply, “that 
it makes me think you’ve got some bee in your bonnet: 
some silly woman-notion. You think—Heaven knows 
what you think! perhaps that—^that you ought not to 
marry because of something—anything—” he stam¬ 
mered with earnestness; “but I want you to know 
this: that I don’t care what your reason is! You may 
have committed murder, for all the difference it makes 
404 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to me.” The clumsy and elaborate lightness of his words 
trembled with the seriousness of his voice. “You may 
have broken every one of the Ten Commandments; I 
don’t care! Helena, do you understand? It’s nothing 
to me! You may have broken —all of them.'' He spoke 
with solemn passion, holding out his hands toward her; 
his voice shook, but his melancholy face was serene 
with knowledge and understanding. “Oh, my dear,” he 
said, “I love you and you are fond of me. That’s all I 
care about! Nothing else, nothing else.” 

Her start of attention, her dilating eyes, made the tears 
spring to his own eyes. “Helena, you do believe me, 
don’t you?” 

She could not answer him; she had grown pale and 
then red, then pale again. “Oh,” she said in a whisper, 
“you are a good man! What have I done to deserve 
such a friend? But no, dear friend, no.” 

He struck her shoulder heavily, as if she had been 
another man. “Well, anyway,” he said, “you’ll re¬ 
member that when you are willing, I am waiting?” 

She nodded. “I shall never forget your goodness,” 
she said, brokenly. 

He did not try to detain her with arguments or en¬ 
treaties, but as she turned toward the library door he 
suddenly pushed it shut, and quietly took her in his 
arms and kissed her. 

She went away quite speechless. She did not even 
remember to say good-night and good-by to Miss White, 
although she was to leave Mercer the next morning. 


CHAPTER XXXIV 


When Blair heard that Mrs. Richie was coming to stay 
with Nannie he said, briefly, “I won't come in while she 
is here.” He wrote to his sister during those three weeks 
and sent her flowers—kindness to Nannie was a habit 
with Blair; and indeed he really missed seeing her, and 
was glad for other reasons than his own embarrassment 
when he heard that her visitor was going away. “I 
understand Mrs. Richie takes the 7.30 to-night,” he said 
to his wife. Elizabeth was silent; it did not occur to 
her to mention that she had seen Nannie and heard that 
Mrs. Richie had decided to stay over another night. She 
rarely volunteered any information to Blair. 

“ Elizabeth,” he said, “ what do you say to going down 
to Willis’s for supper, and rowing home in the moonlight ? 
We can drop in and see Nannie on the way back to the 
hotel—^after Mrs. Richie has gone.” He saw some list¬ 
less excuse trembling on her lips, and interrupted her: 
“ Do say ‘ yes ’! It is months since we have been on the 
river.” 

She hesitated, then seemed to reach some sudden de¬ 
cision. ” Yes,” she said, ” I’ll go.” 

Blair’s face lighted with pleasure. Perhaps the silence 
which had hardened between them since the day the 
question of his money had been discussed would break 
now. 

The late afternoon was warm with the yellow haze of 
October sunshine when they walked out over the bridge 
to the toll-house wharf, where Blair hired a boat. He 
made her as comfortable as he could in the stem, and 
406 


THE IRON WOMAN 


when he gave her the tiller-ropes she took them in a busi¬ 
ness-like way, as if really entering into the spirit of his 
little expedition. A moment later they were floating 
down the river; there was nearly half a mile of fur¬ 
naces and slag-banked shore before they left Mercer’s 
smoke and grime behind them and began to drift be¬ 
tween low-lying fields or through narrow reaches where 
the vineyard-covered hills came down close to the water. 

“Elizabeth, what do you say to going East next 
month?” Blair said; “perhaps we can persuade Nannie 
to go, too.” 

She was leaning back against the cushions he had 
arranged for her, holding her white parasol so that it hid 
her face. “I don’t see,” she said, “how you can afford 
to travel much; where will you get the money ?” 

“ Oh, it has all been very easily arranged; Nannie can 
draw pretty freely against the estate now, and she makes 
me an ‘allowance,’ so to speak, until things are settled; 
then she’ll hand my principal over to me. It’s a nuisance 
not to have it now; but we can get along well enough.” 

Then Elizabeth asked her question: “And when you 
get the principal, what will you do with it?” 

“ Invest it; pretty tough, isn’t it, when you think what 
I ought to have had?” 

“And when,” said Elizabeth, very softly, “will you 
build the hospital ?” She lifted her parasol slightly, and 
gave him a look that was like a knife; then lowered it 
again. 

“Build the hospital! What hospital?” 

“The hospital near the Works, that your mother put 
that money aside for.” 

Blair’s hands tightened on his oars. Instinctively he 
knew that a critical moment was confronting him. He 
did not know just what the danger in it was, but he knew 
there was danger. “ My mother changed her mind about 
that, Elizabeth.” 

She lifted the parasol again, and looked full at him; 

407 


THE IRON WOMAN 


tha white shadow of the silk made the dark amber of her 
unsmiling eyes singularly luminous. “No,” she said; 
“ your mother did not change her mind. Nannie thought 
she did, but it was not so.” She spoke with stem cer¬ 
tainty. “Your mother didn’t mean you to have that 
money. She meant it for —a hospital.” 

Blair stopped rowing and leaned on his oars. “Why 
don’t you speak his name ?” he said, between his teeth. 

The parasol fell back on her shoulder; she grew very 
white; the hard line that used to be a dimple was like a 
gash in her cheek; she looked suddenly old. “I will 
certainly speak his name: David Richie. Your mother 
meant the money for David Richie.” 

“That,” said Blair, “is a matter of opinion. You 
think she did. I think she didn’t. I think she meant 
it for the person whose pame she wrote on the certificate. 
That person will keep it.” 

Elizabeth was silent. Blair began to row again, 
softly. The anger in his face died out and left misery 
behind it. Oh, how she hated him; and how she loved— 
him. At that moment Blair hated David as one only 
hates the human creature one has injured. They did 
not speak again for the rest of the slow drift down to 
Willis’s. Once Blair opened his lips to bid her notice 
that the overhanging willows and chestnuts mirrored 
themselves so clearly in the water that the skiff seemed 
to cut through autumnal foliage, and the sound of the 
ripple at the prow was like the rustle of leaves; but the 
preoccupation in her face silenced him. It was after four 
when, brushing past a fringe of willows, the skiff bumped 
softly against a float half hidden in the yellowing sedge 
and grass at Willis’s landing. Blair got out, and draw¬ 
ing the boat alongside, held up his hand to his wife, but 
she ignored his assistance. As she sprang lightly out, 
the float rocked a little and the water splashed over the 
planks. There was a dank smell of wet wood and rankly 
growing water-weeds. A ray of sunshine, piercing the 
408 


THE IRON WOMAN 


roof of willow leaves, struck the single blossom of a 
monkey-flower, that sparkled suddenly in the green 
darkness like a topaz. 

“ Elizabeth,'’ Blair said in a low voice—^he was holding 
the gunwale of the boat and he did not look at her; 
“Elizabeth, all I want money for is to give you every¬ 
thing you want.” She was silent. He made the skiff 
fast and followed her up the path to the little inn on the 
bank. There were some tables out under the locust- 
trees, and a welcoming landlord came hurrying to meet 
them with suggestions of refreshments. 

“ What will you have ?” Blair asked. 

“Anything—^nothing; I don’t care,” Elizabeth said; 
and Blair gave an order he thought would please her. 

Below them the river, catching the sunset light, blos¬ 
somed with a thousand stars. Elizabeth watched the 
dancing glitter absently; when Blair, forgetting for a 
moment the depression of the last half-hour, said im¬ 
pulsively, “Oh, how beautiful that is!” she nodded, and 
came out of her abstraction to call his attention to the 
reflected gold of a great chestnut on the other side of the 
stream. 

“Are you warm enough?” he asked. He said to him¬ 
self, with a sigh of relief, that evidently she had dropped 
the dangerous subject of the hospital. “There is a chill 
in these October evenings as the sun goes down,” he re¬ 
minded her, 

“Yes.” 

“Elizabeth,” he burst out, “why can’t we talk some¬ 
times? Haven’t we anjrthing in common? Can’t we 
ever talk, like ordinary husbands and wives? You 
would show more civility to a beggar!” But as he 
spoke the waiter pushed his tray between them, and she 
did not answer. When Blair poured out a glass of wine 
for her she shook her head, 

“ I don’t want anything.” 

He looked at her in desoatr; “I you. I suppose 
409 


THE IRON WOMAN 


you wouldn’t believe me if I should try to tell you how I 
love you—and yet you don’t give me a decent word once 
a month!” 

“Blair,” she said, quietly, “that is final, is it—^about 
the money ? You are going to keep it ?” 

“lam certainly going to keep it.” 

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “It is final,” she re¬ 
peated, slowly. 

“You are angry,” he cried, “because I won’t give the 
money my mother gave me, all the money I have in the 
world, to the man whom you threw off like an old glove!” 

“No,” she said, slowly, “I don’t think I am angry. 
But it seems somehow to be more than I can bear; a sort 
of last straw, I suppose,” she said, smiling faintly. “ But 
I’m not angry, I think. Still, perhaps I am. I don’t 
really know.” 

Blair struck a match under the table. His hand hold¬ 
ing his cigarette trembled. “To the best of my knowl¬ 
edge and belief, Elizabeth, I am honest. I believe my 
mother meant me to have that money. She did not 
mean to have it go to—to a hospital.” 

Elizabeth dug the ferrule of her parasol into the gravel 
at her feet. “ It is David’s money. You took his wife. 
Now you are taking his money. . . . You can’t keep both 
of them.” She said this very gently, so gently that for a 
moment he did not grasp the sense of her words. When 
he did it seemed to him that she did not herself realize 
what she had said, for immediately, in the same calmly 
matter-of-fact way, she began to speak of unimportant 
things: the river was very low, wasn’t it ? What a pity 
they were cutting the trees on the opposite hill. “ They 
are burning the brush,” she said; “do you smell the 
smoke? I love the smell of burning brush in October.” 
She was simpler and pleasanter than she had been for a 
long time. But he could not know that it was because 
she felt, inarticulately, that her burden had been lifted; 
she herself could not have said why, but she was almost 
410 


THE IRON WOMAN 


happy. Blair was confused to the point of silence by her 
abrupt return to the commonplace. He glanced at her 
with furtive anxiety. “Oh, see the moon!” Elizabeth 
said, and for a moment they watched the great disk of 
the Hunter’s moon rising in the translucent dusk behind 
the hills. 

“That purple haze in the east is like the bloom on a 
plum,” Blair said. 

“ I think we had better go now,” Elizabeth said, rising. 
But though she had seemed so friendly, she did not even 
turn her head to see if he were following her, and he had 
to hurry to overtake her as she went down the path to 
the half-sunken float that was rocking slightly in the 
grassy shallows. As he knelt, steadying the boat with 
one hand, he held the other up to her, and this time 
she did not repulse him; but when she put her hand 
into his, he kissed it with abrupt, unhappy passion,—and 
she drew it from him sharply. When she took her place 
in the stem and lifted the tiller-ropes she looked at 
him, gathering up his oars, with curious gentleness. . . . 

She was sorry for him, for he seemed to care so much; 
—and this was the end! She had tried to bear her life. 
Nobody could imagine how hard she had tried; life 
had been her punishment, so with all her soul and all her 
body, she had tried to bear it! But this was the end. It 
was not possible to try any more. “I have borne it as 
long as I can,” she thought. Yet as she had said, she was 
not angry. She wondered, vaguely, listening to the dip of 
the oars, at this absence of anger. She had been able 
to talk about the bonfires, and she had thought the 
moon beautiful. No; she was not angry. Or if she 
were, then her anger was unlike all the other angers that 
had scourged and torn the surface of her life; they had 
been storms, all clamor and confusion and blinding 
flashes, with more or less indifference to resulting ruin, 
But this anger, which could not be recognized as anger, 
was a noiseless cataclysm in the very center of her being; 

411 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a tidal wave, that was lifting and lifting, moving slowly, 
too full for sound, in the resistless advance of an ab¬ 
sorbing purpose of ruin. “I am not angry,” she said to 
herself; “but I think I am dying.” 

The pallor of her face frightened Blair, who was 
straining at his oars against the current: “Elizabeth! 
What is the matter ? Shall I stop ? Shall we go ashore ? 
You are ill!” 

“No; I’m not. Go on, please.” 

“ But there is something the matter I” 

She shook her head. “Don’t stop. We’ve gone ever 
so far down-stream, just in this minute.” 

Blair looked at her anxiously. A little later he tried 
to make her talk; asked her how she felt, and called her 
attention to the bank of clouds that was slowly climbing 
up the sky. But she was silent. As usual, she seemed 
to have nothing to say to him. He rowed steadily, in 
long, beautiful strokes, and she sat watching the dark 
water lap and glimmer past the side of the skiff. As 
they worked up-stream, the sheen of oil began to show 
again in faint and rocking iridescence; once she leaned 
over and touched the water with her fingers; then looked 
at them with a frown. 

“Look out!” Blair said; “trim a little, will you?” 

She sat up quickly: “ I wonder if it is easy to drown?” 

“Mighty easy—if you lean too hard on the gunwale,” 
he said, good-naturedly. 

“Does it take very long?” 

“To drown? I never tried it, but I believe not; 
though I understand that it’s unpleasant while it lasts.” 
He watched her wistfully; if he could only make her 
smile! 

“I suppose dying is generally unpleasant,” she said, 
and glanced down into the black oily water with a 
shiver. 

It was quite dark by this time, and Blair was keeping 
close to the shore to avoid the current narrowing between 
412 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the piers of the old bridge. When they reached Mrs. 
Todd’s wharf Elizabeth was still staring into the water. 

“It is so black here, so dirty! I wouldn’t like to have 
it touch me. It’s cleaner down at Willis’s,” she said, 
thoughtfully. Blair, making fast at the landing, agreed: 
“Yes, if I wanted a watery grave I’d prefer the river at 
Willis’s to this.” Then he offered her a pleading hand; 
but she sat looking at the water. “ How clean the ocean 
is, compared to a river,” she said; then noticed his hand. 
She took it calmly enough, and stepped out of the boat. 
She had forgotten, he thought, her displeasure about the 
money; there was only the usual detachment. When 
he said it was too early to go to Nannie’s,—“it isn’t seven 
yet, and Mrs. Richie won’t leave the house until a 
quarter past;” she agreed that they had better go to 
the hotel. 

“What do you say to the theater to-night?” he asked. 
But she shook her head. 

“Tou go; I would rather be alone ” 

“I hear there’s a good play in town?” 

She was silent. 

Blair said something under his breath with angry 
hopelessness. This was always the way so far as any 
personal relation between them went; she did not seem 
to see him; she did not even hear what he was saying. 
“ You always want to be alone, so far as I am concerned,” 
he said. She made no answer. After dinner he took 
himself off. “She doesn’t want me round, so I’ll clear 
out,” he said, sullenly; he had not the heart even to go 
to Nannie’s. “I’ll drop into the theater, or perhaps I’ll 
just walk,” he thought, drearily. He wandered out 
into the street, but the sky had clouded over and there 
was a soft drizzle of rain, so he turned into the first glar¬ 
ing entrance that yawned at him from the pavement. 


CHAPTER XXXV 


When Blair came home, a little after eleven, she had 
gone. 

At first he did not grasp the significance of her absence. 
He called to her from their parlor: “I want to tell you 
about the play; perfect trash!” No answer. He 
glanced through the open door of her bedroom; not there. 
He hurried to his own room, crying: “ Elizabeth I Where 
are you?” Then stood blankly waiting. Had she gone 
down-stairs? He went out into the hall and, leaning 
over the banisters, listened to the stillness—^that un¬ 
human stillness of a hotel corridor; but there was no 
bang of an iron door, no clanking rumble of an ascending 
elevator. Had she gone out ? He looked at his watch, 
and his heart came up into his throat; out—at this hour! 
But perhaps after he had left her, she had suddenly 
decided to spend the night at her uncle’s or Nannie’s. 
In that case she would have left word in the office. He 
was thrusting his arms into his overcoat and settling 
his hat on his head, even while he was dashing down¬ 
stairs to inquire: 

“Has Mrs. Maitland left any message for me?” 

The clerk looked vague: “We didn’t see her go out, 
sir. But I suppose she went by the ladies’ entrance. 
No; she didn’t leave any message, sir.” 

Blair suddenly knew that he was frightened. He could 
not have said why. Certainly he was not conscious of 
any reason for fright; but some blind instinct sent a 
wave of alarm all through him. His knees felt cold; 
there was a sinking sensation just below his breast-bone, 
414 


THE IRON WOMAN 


*‘What an ass I am!” he said to himself; “she has gone 
to her uncle’s, of course.” He said something of the 
kind, with elaborate carelessness, to the clerk; “if she 
comes back before I do, just say I have gone out on an 
errand.’’ He was frightened, but not to the extent of let¬ 
ting that inquisitive idiot behind the counter know it. 
” If he had been attending to his business,” he thought,, 
angrily, ‘‘he would have seen her go, and he could have 
told me when it was. I’ll go to Mr. Ferguson’s. Of 
course she’s there.” 

He stood on the curb-stone for a minute, looking for 
a carriage; but the street was deserted. He could not 
take the time to go to the livery-stable. He started 
hurriedly; once he broke into a run, then checked him¬ 
self with the reminder that he was a fool. As he drew 
near her uncle’s house, he began to defend himself against 
disappointment: ‘‘She’s at Nannie’s. Why did I waste 
time coming here ? I know she is at Nannie’s I” 

Robert Ferguson’s house was dark, except for streaks 
of light under the blinds of the library windows. Blair, 
springing up the front steps, rang; then held his breath 
to listen for some one coming through the hall; his heart 
seemed smothering in his throat. ‘‘I know she isn’t 
here; she’s at Nannie’s,” he told himself. He was 
acutely conscious of the dank smell of the frosted honey¬ 
suckle clinging limply to the old iron trellis that inclosed 
the veranda; but when the door opened he was casual 
enough—except for a slight breathlessness. 

‘‘Mr. Ferguson! is Elizabeth here?” 

‘‘No,” Robert Ferguson said, surprised, ‘‘was she 
coming here?” 

‘‘She was to be here, or—or at Nannie’s,” Blair said,, 
carelessly, ‘‘I didn’t know which. I’ll go and get her 
there.” His own words reassured him, and he apolo¬ 
gized lightly. ‘‘Sorry to have disturbed you, sir. 
Good-night!” And he was gone before another question* 
could be asked. But out in the street he found himself 

415 


27 


THE IRON WOMAN 


running. “Of course she’s at Nannie’s!’’ he said, pant¬ 
ing. He even had a twinge of anger at Elizabeth foi 
giving him all this trouble. “She ought to have left 
word,’’ he thought, crossly. It was a relief to be cross' 
nothing very serious can have happened to a person 
who merely makes you cross.' The faint drizzle of 
the early evening had turned to rain, which added to 
his irritation. “She’s all right; and it’s confoundedly 
unpleasant to get soaking wet,’’ he reflected. Yes; he 
was honestly cross. Yet in spite of the reassurances of 
his mind and his temper, his body was still frightened; 
he was hurrying; his breath came quickly. He dashed 
on, so absorbed in denying his alarm that on one of the 
crossings only a quick leap kept him from being knocked 
down by a carriage full of revelers. “ Here, you! Look 
out! What’s the matter with you?’’ the cab-driver 
yelled, pulling his horses back and sidewise, but not be¬ 
fore the pole of the hack had grazed Blair’s shoulder. 
There was a screech of laughter, a woman’s vociferating 
fright, a whiff of cigar smoke, and a good-natured curse: 
“Say, dam you, you’re too happy to be out alone, 
sonny!’’ Blair did not hear them. Shantytown, black 
and silent and wet, huddled before him; from the smoke¬ 
stacks of the Works banners of flame flared out into the 
rain, and against them his mother’s house loomed up, 
dark in the darkness. At the sight of it all his panic 
returned, and again he tried to discount his disappoint¬ 
ment: “She isn’t here, of course; she has gone to the 
hotel. Why didn’t I wait for her there ? What a fool I 
am!’’ But back in his mind, as he banged the iron gate 
and rushed up the steps, he was saying; “If she isn't 
here—?’’ 

The house was absolutely dark; the fan-light over the 
great door was black; there was no faintest glimmer of 
light anywhere. Everybody was asleep. Blair rang 
violently, and pounded on the panels of the door with 
both hands. “Nannie! Elizabeth! Harris!—confound 
416 


THE IRON WOMAN 

the old idiot! why doesn’t he answer the bell? 
Nannie—” 

A. window opened on the floor above. “What is 
it?” demanded a quavering feminine voice. “Who’s 
there?” 

“ Nannie! Dam it, why doesn’t somebody answer the 
bell in this house? Is Elizabeth—” His voice died in 
his throat. 

“ Oh, Blair! Is that you? You scared me to death,” 
Nannie called down. ‘ What on earth is the matter?” 

“Is—is Elizabeth here?” 

“Elizabeth? No; of course not! Where is she?” 

“ If I knew, would I be asking you ?” Blair called back 
furiously; “she must be here!” 

“Wait. I’ll come down and let you in,” Nannie said; 
he heard a muffled colloquy back in the room, and 
then the window closed sharply. Far off, a church 
clock struck one. Blair stood with a hand on the door¬ 
knob; through the leaded side-windows he saw a light 
wavering down through the house; a moment later 
Nannie, lamp in hand, shivering in her thin dressing- 
gown, opened the door. 

“Has she been here this evening?” 

“ Blair! You scare me to death! No; she hasn’t been 
here. What is the matter? Your coat is all wet! Is 
it raining?” 

“She isn’t at the hotel, and I don’t know where she 
is.” 

“Why, she’s at Mr. Ferguson’s, of course!” 

“ No, she isn’t. I’ve been there.” 

“She may be at home by this time,” Nannie faltered, 
and Blair, assenting, was just turning to rush away, when 
another voice said, with calm peremptoriness 

“What is the matter?” 

Blair turned to see Mrs. Richie, She had come quietly 
down-stairs, and was standing beside Nannie. Even in 
his scared preoccupation, the sight of David’s mother 

417 


THE IRON WOMAN 


shook him. “I—I thought,” he stammered, ‘‘that you 
had gone home, Mrs. Richie.” 

‘‘She had a little cold, and I would not let her go 
until to-morrow morning,” Nannie said; ‘‘you always 
take more cold on those horrid sleeping-cars.” Nannie 
had no consciousness of the situation; she was far too 
alarmed to be embarrassed. Blair cringed; he was scar¬ 
let to his temples; yet under his shame, he had the 
feeling that he had when, a little boy, he clung to David’s 
pretty mother for protection. 

‘‘Oh, Mrs. Richie,” he said, “I am so worried about 
Elizabeth!” 

‘‘What about her?” 

‘‘She said something this afternoon that frightened me.” 

‘‘What?” 

But he would not tell her. ‘‘It was nothing. Only 
she was very angry; and—she will do anything when she 
is angry,” Mrs. Richie gave him a look, but he was too 
absorbed to feel its significance. ‘‘It was something 
about—well, a sort of silly threat. I didn’t take it in at 
the time; but afterward I thought perhaps she meant 
something. Really, it was nothing at all. But—” his 
voice died in his throat and his eyes were terrified. 
There was such pain in his face that before she knew it 
David’s mother was sorry for him; she even put her 
hand on his shoulder. 

‘‘ It was just a mood,” she comforted him. And Blair, 
taking the white, maternal hand in both of his, looked at 
her speechlessly; his chin trembled. Instantly, without 
words of shame on one side or of forgiveness on the other, 
they were back again, these two, in the old friendship 
of youth and middle age. ‘‘It was a freak,” said Mrs. 
Richie, soothingly. ‘‘She is probably at the hotel by 
this time. Don’t be troubled, Blair. Go and see. If 
she isn’t at the hotel let me know at once,” 

‘‘Yes, yes; I will,” Blair said. ‘‘She must be there 
now, of course. I know there’s nothing the matter, but 
418 


THE IRON WOMAN 


I don’t like to have her out so late by herself.” He 
turned to open the front door, fumbling with haste over 
the latch; Nannie called to him to wait and she would 
get him an umbrella. But he did not hear her. He was 
saying to himself that of course she was at the hotel; and 
he was off again into the darkness! 

As the door banged behind him the two women looked 
at each other in dismay. “ Oh, Mrs. Richie, what can be 
the matter?” Nannie said. 

‘‘Just one of Elizabeth’s moods. She has gone out to 
walk.” 

” At this time of night ? It’s after one o’clock!” 

” She is probably safe and sound at the River House 
now.” 

‘‘I wish we had one of those new telephone things,” 
Nannie said. ‘‘Mamma was always talking about 
getting one. Then Blair could let us know as soon as he 
gets to the hotel.” Nannie was plainly scared; Mrs. 
Richie grave and a little cold. She had had, to her 
amazement, a wave of tenderness for Blair; the reaction 
from it came in anger at Elizabeth. Elizabeth was al¬ 
ways making trouble! ‘‘Poor Blair,” she said, involun¬ 
tarily. At the moment she was keenly sorry for him; 
after all, abominable as his conduct had been, love, of a 
kind, had been at the root of it. “I can forgive love,” 
Helena Richie said to herself, ‘‘but not hate. Elizabeth 
never loved David or she couldn’t have done what she 
did. , . . Nothing will happen to her,” she said aloud. It 
occurred to this gentle woman that nothing ever did 
happen to the people one felt could be spared from this 
world; which wicked thought made her so shocked at 
herself that she hardly heard Nannie’s nervous chatter: 
‘‘ If she hasn’t come home, Blair will be back here in half 
an hour; it takes fifteen minutes to go to the hotel and 
fifteen minutes to come back. If he isn’t here at a 
quarter to two, everything is all right.” 

They went into the parlor and lit the gas; Nannie 
419 


THE IRON WOMAN 


suggested a fire, but Mrs. Richie said it wasn’t worth 
while. “We’ll be going up-stairs in a few minutes,” she 
said. She was not really worried about Elizabeth; 
partly because of that faintly cynical belief that nothing 
could happen to the poor young creature who had made 
so much trouble for everybody; but also because she was 
singularly self-absorbed. Those words of Robert Fer¬ 
guson’s, when he kissed her in his library, had never left 
her mind. She thought of them now when she and 
Nannie sat down in that silence of waiting which seems 
to tingle with speech. The dim light from the gas-jet by 
the mantelpiece did not penetrate beyond the dividing 
arch of the great room; behind the grand piano sprawl¬ 
ing sidewise between the black marble columns, all was 
dark. The shadow of the chandelier, muffled in its 
balloon of brown paper muslin, made an island of dark¬ 
ness on the ceiling, and the four big canvases were four 
black oblongs outlined in faintly glimmering gilt. 

“ I remember sitting here with your mother, the night 
you children were lost,” Mrs. Richie said. “Oh, Nannie 
dear, you must move out of this house; it is too gloomy!” 
But Nannie was not thinking of the house. 

“ Where can she have gone ?” she said. 

Mrs. Richie could offer no suggestion. Her explana^ 
tion to herself was that Blair and Elizabeth had quar¬ 
reled, and Elizabeth, in a paroxysm of temper, had 
rushed off to spend the night in some hotel by herself. 
But she did not want to say this to Nannie. To herself 
she said that things did sometimes turn out for the best 
in this world, after all—^if only David could realize it! 
“She would have made him dreadfully unhappy,” Hel¬ 
ena Richie thought; “she doesn’t know what love 
means.” But alas! David did not know that he had 
had an escape. She sighed, remembering that talk on 
the beach, and those wicked things he had said,—^things 
for which she must be in some way to blame. “If he 
had had a different mother,” she thought, heavily, “he 
420 


THE IRON WOMAN 


might not have—” A sudden shock of terror jarred all 
through her —could Elizabeth have gone to David? The 
very thought turned her cold; it was as if some slimy, 
poisonous thing had touched her. Then common sense 
came in a wave of relief: “ Of course not! Why should 
she do such an absurd thing?” But in spite of common 
sense, Helena Richie’s lips went dry. 

“It’s a quarter to two,” Nannie said. “He hasn’t 
come; she must be at the hotel.” 

“ I’m sure she is,” Mrs. Richie agreed.- 
“Let’s wait five minutes,” Nannie said; “but I’m 
certain it’s all right.” 

“Of course it’s all right,” Mrs. Richie said again, and 
got on her feet with a shiver of relief. 

“It gave me a terrible scare,” Nannie confessed, and 
turned out the gas. “I had a perfectly awful thought, 
Mrs. Richie; a wicked thought. I was afraid she had— 
had done something to herself. You know she is so 
crazy when she is angry, and—” 

The front gate banged. Nannie gave a faint scream. 
“Oh, Mrs. Richie! Oh—” 

It was Helena Richie who opened the door before 
Blair had even reached it. “ Well ? Well ?” 

“Not there. . . 


CHAPTER XXXVI 


All night long Elizabeth watched a phantom land* 
scape flit past the window of the sleeping-car. Some¬ 
times a cloud of smoke, shot through with sparks, 
brushed the glass like a billowing curtain, and sometimes 
the thunderous darkness of a tunnel swept between her 
and spectral trees or looming hilltops. She lay there on 
her pillows, looking at the flying glimmer of the night and 
drawing long breaths of peace. The steady, rhythmical 
pounding of the wheels, the dull, rushing roar of the rails, 
the black, spinning country outside her window, shut 
away her old world of miseries and shames. Behind the 
stiff green curtains, that swung in and out, in and out, 
to the long roll of the car, there were no distractions, no 
fears of interruption, no listening apprehensions; she 
could relax into the wordless and exultant certainty of 
her purpose. 

For at last, after these long months of mere endurance, 
she had a purpose. 

And how calmly she was fulfilling it! “For I am not 
angry,” she said to herself, with the same surprise she 
had felt when, at Willis’s that afternoon, she had denied 
Blair’s charge of anger. Outside in the darkness, all the 
world was asleep. The level stretches of vanishing fields, 
the faint glisten of roads, were empty. When the train 
swept thundering through little towns, the flying station 
lights, the twinkle of street lamps, even the solitary 
lanterns of switchmen running along the tracks, mads 
the sleep seem only more profound. But Elizabeth waa 
awake in every fiber; once or twice, for the peace of it, 
422 


THE IRON WOMAN 


she closed her eyes; but she did not mean to sleep. She 
meant to think out every step that she must take; but 
just at first, in the content of decision, she did not even 
want to think. She only wanted to feel that the end 
had come. 

It was during the row up the river that her purpose had 
cleared before her eyes; for an instant the sight of it had 
startled her into that pallor which had frightened Blair; 
then she accepted it with a passionate satisfaction. It 
needed no argument ; she knew without reasoning about 
it what she must do. But the way to do it was not plain; 
it was while she and Blair sat at dinner, and he read his 
paper and she played with her food, that a plan grew 
slowly in her mind. The carrying it out—^at least to this 
point; the alert and trembling fear of some obstacle, had 
greatly exhausted her. It had also blotted out every- 
thing but itself. She forgot her uncle and Miss White; 
that she was going to give them pain did not occur to her 
until safe from their possible interference, in the dark, 
behind the slowly swaying curtains of her section, her 
fatigue began to lessen. Then, vaguely, she thought of 
them. . . . they would be sorry. She frowned, faintly 
troubled by their sorrow. It was midnight before she 
remembered Blair: poor Blair! he cared so much about 
her. How could he,—when she did not care for him? 
Still, it did not follow that not being loved prevented 
you from loving. David had ceased to love her, but that 
had not made her love cease. Yes; she was afraid they 
would all be unhappy; but it would be only for a while. 
She sighed; it was a peaceful sigh. Her regret for the 
sorrow that she would cause was the regret of one far off, 
helpless to avert the pain, who has no relation to it ex¬ 
cept that of an observer. She said to herself, calmly, 
“ Poor Uncle Robert.'* 

As she grew more rested, the vagueness of her regret 
sharpened a little. She realized with a pang how worried 
they would be—^before they began to be sorry; and 
423 


THE IRON WOMAN 


worry is so hard to bear! “I wish I could have spared 
Uncle Robert and Cherry-pie,” she said, in real distress. 
It occurred to her that she had given them many un¬ 
happy moments. “ I was always a trouble; what a pity 
I was ever bom.” She thought suddenly of her mother, 
remembering how she used to excuse her temper on the 
ground that her mother had had no self-control. She 
smiled faintly in the darkness at the childishness of such 
an excuse. *‘She wasn’t to blame. I could have con¬ 
quered it, but I didn’t. I did nothing all my life but 
make trouble,” She thought of her life as a thing of the 
past. “ I was a great trial to them; it will be better for 
everybody this way,” she said; and nestled down into 
the thought of the “way,” with a satisfaction which 
was absolute comfort. Better; but still better if she 
had never lived. Then Blair would not have been disin¬ 
herited, and by being disinherited driven into the dis¬ 
honor of keeping money not intended for him. ‘‘It’s 
really all my fault,” she reflected, and looked out of the 
window with unseeing eyes. Yes; all that had hap¬ 
pened was her fault. Oh, how many things she had hurt 
and spoiled! She had injured Blair; his mother had said 
so. And poor Nannie! for Nannie’s offense grew out of 
Elizabeth’s conduct. As for David—David, who had 
stopped loving her. . . . 

Well, she wouldn’t hurt people any more, now. Never 
any more. 

Just then the train jarred slowly to a standstill in a 
vasw train-shed; up under its glass and girders, arc- 
lamps sent lurching shadows through the smoke and 
touched the clouds of steam with violet gleams. Eliza¬ 
beth could see dark, gnome-like creatures, each with a 
hammer, and with a lantern swinging from a bent elbow, 
crouching along by the cars and tapping every wheel. 
She counted the blows that tested the trucks for the 
climb up the mountains: click-click; click-click. She 
was glad they were testing them; she must get across the 
424 


THE IRON WOMAN 


mountains safely; there must be no interference or delay, 
she had so little time! For by morning they would 
guess, those three worried people—who had not yet be¬ 
gun to be sorry—they would guess what she had done, and 
they would follow her. She saw the gnomes slouching 
back past the cars, upright this time; then she felt the 
enormous tug of the engine beginning the up-grade. It 
grew colder, and she was glad of the blankets which she 
had not liked to touch when she first lay down in her 
berth. Outside there was a faint whitening along the 
horizon; but it dimmed, and the black outlines of the 
mountains were lost, as if the retreating night hesitated 
and returned; then she saw that her window was touched 
here and there by slender javelins of rain. They came 
faster and faster, striking on and over one another; now 
they turned to drops; she stopped thinking, absorbed 
in watching a drop roll down the glass—pause, lurch 
forward, touch another drop; then a third; then zigzag 
rapidly down the pane. She found herself following the 
racing drops with fascinated eyes; she even speculated 
as to which would reach the bottom first; she had a 
sense of luxury in being able, in the fortress of her berth, 
to think of such things as racing raindrops. By the time 
it was light enough to distinguish the stretching fields 
again, it was raining hard. Once in a while the train 
rushed past a farm-house, where the smoke from the 
chimney sagged in the gray air until it lay like a rope of 
mist along the roof. It was so light now that she could 
see the sodden carpet of yellow leaves under the maples, 
and she noticed that the crimson pennons of the sumacs 
drooped and dripped and clung together. The monot¬ 
onous clatter of the wheels had fallen into a rhythm, 
which pounded out steadily and endlessly certain words 
which were the refrain of her purpose: ''Afterward, they 
will say I had the right to see him*' Sometimes she re¬ 
minded herself, meekly, that he no longer loved her. 
But there was no trace of resentment in her mind; how 


THE IRON WOMAN 


could he love her? Nor did the fact that his love had 
ceased make any difference in her purpose: “ Afterward, 
they will say I had the right to see him.’* 

When the day broke— a, bleary, gray day, cold, and 
with sweeping showers of rain, she slept for a little while; 
but wakened with a start, for the train was still. Had 
they arrived? Had she lost a moment? Then she 
recognized the locality, and knew that there was an hour 
yet before she could be in the same city with him; and 
again the wheels began their clamorous assertion: “the 
right to see him; the right to see him.” 

Her plan was simple enough; she would go at once to 
Mrs. Richie’s house and ask for the doctor. “ I won’t 
detain him very long; it will only take a little while to 
tell him,” she said to herself. It came over her with the 
shivering sense of danger escaped, that in another day 
she would have been too late, his mother would be at 
home! “She wouldn’t let him see me,” she thought, 
fearfully. Afterward, after she had seen him, she would 
take a train to New York and cross the ferry. . . . “ The 
water is pretty clean there,” she thought. 

She was dressed and ready to leave the train long 
before the station was reached. When the unkempt, 
haggard crowd swarmed off the cars and poured its 
jostling, hurrying length through the train-shed dim 
with puffing clouds of steam and clamorous with engines, 
Elizabeth was as fresh as if she had just come from her 
own house. She looked at herself in one of the big 
mirrors of the station dressing-room with entire satisfac¬ 
tion . “I am a little pretty even yet, ’ ’ she told herself, can¬ 
didly. She wanted very much to be pretty now. When 
she went out to the street and found it raining in a steady, 
gray downpour, her heart sank,—oh, she must not get 
wet and draggled, now'! Just for this hour she must be 
the old Elizabeth, the Elizabeth that he used to love, 
fresh, with starry eyes and a shell-like color in her cheeks! 
—and indeed the cold rain was making her face glow like 

426 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a rose; but her eyes were solemn, not starry. As hei 
cab jolted along the rainy streets, past the red-brick 
houses with their white shutters and scoured door-steps— 
houses were people were eating their breakfasts and 
reading their morning papers—Elizabeth, sitting on the 
frayed seat of the old hack, looked out of the window 
and thought how strange it all was! It would be just 
like this to-morrow morning, and she would not know 
it. “ How queer!” she said to herself. But she was not 
frightened. “I suppose at the last minute I shall be 
frightened,” she reflected. Then, for a moment, she 
forgot David and tried to realize the unrealizable: “ every¬ 
thing will be going on just the same, and /—” She 
could not realize it, but she did not doubt it. When the 
cab drew up at Mrs. Richie’s door, she was careful to pay 
the man before she got out so that her hat should not be 
spoiled by the rain when David saw it. 

‘‘ He isn’t in, miss,” the maid told her in answer to her 
ring. 

Elizabeth gasped. “What! Not here? Where is 
he?” 

“ He went down to the beach, ’m, yesterday, to see to 
the closing-up of the cottage, ’m.” 

“When is he coming back?” she said, faintly; and the 
woman said, smiling, “To-morrow, ’m.” 

Elizabeth stood blankly on the door-step. To-mor¬ 
row ? There was not going to be any to-morrow! What 
should she do? Her plan had been so definite and de¬ 
tailed that this interruption of his absence —a possibility 
which had not entered into her calculations—threw her 
into absolute confusion. He was away from home! 
What could she do? 

Entirely forgetting the rain, she turned away and 
walked aimlessly down the street. “They’ll know I’ve 
come here, and they’ll find me before I can see him!” she 
said to herself,in terror. “I must go somewhere and decide 
what to do.” She went into the nearest hotel and took 

427 


THE IRON WOMAN 


a room. “I must plan; if I wait until he comes back, 
they’ll find me I” But it was an hour before her plan was 
made; when it was, she sprang up with the old, tumultu¬ 
ous joyousness. Why, of course! How stupid not to 
have thought of it at once I She was so entirely oblivious 
of everything but her own purpose that she would have 
gone out of the hotel on the moment, had not the clerk 
checked her with some murmur about “a little charge.” 
Elizabeth blushed to her temples. “Oh, I heg your 
pardon!” she said. In her mortification she wished that 
the bill had been twice as large. But when she was out 
in the rain, hurrying to the station, again she forgot 
everything except her consuming purpose. In the wait¬ 
ing-room—^there were four hours before the train started 
—^the panic thought took possession of her that she might 
miss him if she went down to the beach. “ It’s raining, 
and he may not stay over until to-morrow; he may be 
coming up this afternoon. But if I stay here they’ll 
come and find me!” She could not face this last alterna¬ 
tive. “They’ll find me, and I won’t be able to tell him; 
they’ll take me home, and he will not have been told!” 
Sitting on the wooden settee in the ladies’ waiting-room, 
she watched the clock until its gaunt white face blurred 
before her eyes. How the long hand crawled! Once, in 
a spasm of fright, she thought that it had stopped, and 
perhaps she had lost her train! 

But at last the moment came; she started,—and as she 
drew nearer and nearer her goal, her whole body strained 
forward, as a man dying of thirst strains toward a spring 
gleaming in the desert distance; once she sighed with 
that anticipation of relief that is a shiver. Again the 
monotonous clatter of the wheels beat out the words 
that all night long over the mountains had grooved 
themselves into her brain: “Afterward, they will say 
I had the right to see him.” Love, which that one mad 
hour, nearly three years before, had numbed and par¬ 
alyzed, was awakening. It was as if a slowly rising tor 
428 


THE IRON WOMAN 


rent, dammed by some immovable barrier, had at last 
reached the brim,—trembled, hesitated: then leaped in 
foaming overflow into its old course! She thought of 
all the things she was going to tell him (but oh, they 
were so many, so many; how could she say them all?). 
“‘I never was so true as when I was false. I never loved 
you so much as when I hated you. I never longed for 
your arms as I did when—’ O God, give me time to 
tell him that! Don’t let them find me before I can tell 
him that. Don't let him have gone back. God, please, 
please let me find him at the cottage so I can tell him.” 
She was sitting on the plush cushion of the jolting, sway¬ 
ing old car, her hand on the back of the seat in front of 
her, every muscle tense with readiness to spring to her 
feet the moment the train stopped. 

It was still raining when she got off at the little station 
which had sprung up out of the sand to accommodate a 
summer population. It was deserted now, and the 
windovjs were boarded over. A passer-by, under a drip¬ 
ping umbrella, lounged along the platform and stopped 
to look at her. “Come down to see cottages?” he in¬ 
quired. She said no; but could she get a carriage to 
take her over to Little Beach ? 

He shook his head sympathetically. “A hack? 
Here? Lord, no! There isn’t no depot carriage running 
at this time of year. You’d ought to have got off at 
Normans, the station above this, and then you could 
have drove over; fourteen miles, though. Something 
of a drive on an evening like this! But Normans is quite 
a place. They run two depot carriages there all winter 
and a dozen in summer.” 

“I’ll walk,” she told him, briefly. 

“It’s more 'an three miles,” he warned her; “and its 
sheeting down! If I had such a thing as an umbrella, 
except this one, I’d—” 

But she had gone. She knew the way; she remem¬ 
bered the summer—oh, so long ago!—when she and 

429 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Nannie had driven over that sandy road along the beach 
on their way to Mrs. Richie’s house. It was so deep 
with mud now that sometimes she had to walk outside 
the wheel-ruts into the wiry beach-grass. The road 
toiled among the dunes; on the shore on her right she 
could hear the creaming lap of the waves; but rain was 
driving in from the sea in an impenetrable curtain, and 
only when in some turn of the wind it lifted and shifted 
could she catch a glimpse of the scarf of foam lying on 
the sands, or see the gray heave of an endless expanse 
that might be water or might be sky folded down into the 
water. It was growing dark; sometimes she blundered 
from the road to one side or the other; sometimes she 
thought she saw approaching figures—a man, perhaps, 
or a vehicle; but as she neared them they were only 
bushes or leaning, wind-beaten pines. She was drenched 
and her clothes seemed intolerably heavy. Oh, how 
David would laugh at her hat! She put up her hand, in 
its soaked and slippery glove, and touched the roses 
about the crown and laughed herself. “ He won’t mind,” 
she said, contentedly. She had forgotten that he had 
stopped loving her. She began to sing under her breath 
the old tune of her gay, inconsequent girlhood— 

“ Oh, won’t it be joyful, joyful, joyful, 

Oh, won’t it be joyful, to meet ...” 

She stopped; something warm was on her face; she had 
not known that she was weeping. Suddenly, far off, she 
saw a glimmer of light. . . . Mrs. Richie’s house! Her 
heart rose in her throat. “David,” she said aloud, 
weakly, “ David, I’m coming just as fast as I can.” 

But when she opened the door of the living-room in 
the little house that sat so close to the crumpling lap 
and crash of the tide, and saw him, his pipe in his hand, 
half rising from his chair by the fire and turning around 
to see who had entered, she could hardly speak his name 

430 


CHAPTER XXXVII 


. And that was Thursday; your letter had come 
in the first mail; and—oh, hush, hush; it was not a wicked 
letter, David. Don’t you suppose I know that, now? 
I knew it—the next day. And I read it. I don’t know 
just what happened then. I can’t remember very 
clearly. I think I felt ‘insulted,’ ... It sounds so 
foolish to say that, doesn’t it? But I was just a girl 
then, and you know what girls are like. . . . David, I 
am not making any excuse. There isn’t any excuse. I 
am just—telling you. I have to talk slowly; I am tired. 
You won’t mind if I talk slowly? ... I suppose I 
thought I had been ‘insulted’; and I remember some¬ 
thing seemed to flame up. You know how it always was 
with me? David, I have never been able to be angry 
since that'day. Isn’t that strange? I’ve never been 
angry since. Well, then, I went out to walk. I re¬ 
member Cherry-pie called down-stairs to know if I had 
a clean pocket-handkerchief. I remember that; and 
yet I can’t seem to remember why I went out to walk. 
. . . And he came up and spoke to me. Oh, I forgot 
to tell you: he’d been in love with me. I meant to tell 
you about that as soon as we were married. . . . Where 
was I?—Oh, yes; he spoke to me. . , 

Her voice broke with exhaustion; she closed her eyes 
and lay back in the big chair, David put her hand 
against his face, and held it there until she opened her 
eyes. She looked at him dumbly for a little while; then 
the slow, monotonous outpouring of all the silent months 
began again: “And I said I hated you. And he said if 
9 ft 431 


THE IRON WOMAN 


1 married him, it would show you that I hated you. 
David, he was fond of me. I have to remember that. 
It wouldn’t be fair not to remember that, would it? I 
was really the one to blame. Oh, I must be fair to him; 
he was fond of me. . . . And all that afternoon, after 
he married me, I was so glad to think how wicked I was. 
I knew how you would suffer. And that made me glad 
to be wicked. ...” 

There was a long pause; he pulled a little shawl across 
her feet, and laid her hand over his eyes; but he was 
silent. 

“Then,” she said, in a whisper, “I died, I think. 1 
suppose that is why I have never been angry since. 
Something was killed in me. . .I’ve wondered a good 
deal about that. David, isn’t it strange how part of you 
can die, and yet you can go on living? Of course I ex¬ 
pected to die. I prayed all the time that I might. But 
I went on living;—you are glad I lived?” she said, in¬ 
credulously, catching some broken murmur from behind 
his hands in which his face was hidden; “glad? Why, 
I should have thought— Well, that was the most 
awful time of all. The only peace I had, just single min¬ 
utes of peace, was when I remembered that you hated 
me. 

He laid his face against her knee, and she felt the fierce 
intake of his breath. 

“You didn't hate me? Oh, don’t say you didn’t, 
David. Don’t! It was the only comfort I had, to have 
you despise me. Although that was just at first. After¬ 
ward, last May, when you walked down to Nannie’s with 
me that afternoon, and I thought you had got all over 
it, I . . . something seemed to be eating my heart away. 
That seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it ? I don’t un¬ 
derstand how I could feel two ways. But just at first I 
w^anted you to hate me. I thought you would be less 
unhappy if you hated me; and besides, I wanted to feel 
the whips. I felt them—oh, I felt them! . . . And all 
432 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the time I thought that soon I would die. But death 
would have been too easy. I had to go on living.” 
There was another long silence; he kissed her hand 
once; but he did not speak. . . . “And the days went 
on, and went on, and went on. Sometimes I didn’t 
feel anything; but sometimes it was like stringing sharp 
beads on a red-hot wire. I suppose that sounds foolish.? 
But when his mother disinherited him, I knew I would 
have to go on—stringing beads. Because it would have 
been mean, then, to leave him. You see that, David? 
Besides, I was a spoiled thing, a worthless thing. If 
staying with him would make up for the harm I had done 
him,—Mrs. Maitland told me I had injured him; why 
of course, there was nothing else to do. I knew you 
would understand. So I stayed. ‘Unkind to me?”’ 
She bent forward a little to hear his smothered question. 
“ Oh no; never. I used to wish he would be. But he— 
loved me”—she shuddered. “Oh, David, how I have 
dreamed of your arms. David . . . David ...” 

They had forgotten that each had believed love had 
ceased in the other; they did not even assert that it 
was unchanged. Nor was there any plea for forgive¬ 
ness on either side. The moment was too great for 
that. 

She sank back in her chair with a long breath. He 
rose, and kneeling beside her, drew her against his 
breast. She sighed with comfort. ''Here! At last to 
be here. I never thought it would be. It is heaven. 
Yes; I shall remember that I have been in heaven. But 
I don’t think I shall be sent to hell. No; God won’t 
punish me any more. It will be just sleep.” 

He had to bend his ear almost to her white lips to 
catch her whisper. “What did I say? I don’t remem¬ 
ber exactly; I am so happy. . . . Let me be quiet a 
little while. I’m pretty tired. May I stay until morn¬ 
ing? It is raining, and if I may stay . . . I will go away 
very early in the morning.” 

433 


THE IRON WOMAN 


The long, rambling, half-whispered story had followed 
the fierce statement, flung at him when she burst in out 
of the storm, and stood, sodden with rain, trembling with 
fatigue and cold, and pushing from her his alarmed and 
outstretched hands,—the statement that she had left 
Blair! There were only a few words in the outburst 
of terrible anger which had been dormant in her for 
all these years: “He stole your wife» Now he is steal¬ 
ing your money. I told him he couldn't keep them 
both. Your wife has come back to you. I have left 
him—“ 

Even while she was stammering, shrilly, the furious 
finality, he caught her, swaying, in his arms. It was an 
hour before she could speak coherently of the happenings 
of the last twenty-four hours; she had to be warmed and 
fed and calmed. And it was curious how the lover in 
him and the physician in him alternated in that hour; 
he had been instant with the soothing commonplace of 
help,—her wet clothes, her chilled body, her hunger, 
were his first concern. “I know you are hungry,*’ he 
said, cheerfully; but his hands shook as he put food 
before her. When he drew her chair up to the fire, and 
kneeling down, took off her wet shoes, he held her slender, 
tired feet in his hands and chafed them gently; but sud¬ 
denly laid them against his breast, warming them, mur¬ 
muring over them with a sobbing breath, as though he 
felt the weariness of the little feet, plodding, plodding, 
plodding through the rain to find him. The next minute 
he was the doctor, ordering her with smiling words to lie 
back in her chair and rest; then looking at her with a 
groan. 

When at last she was coherent again, she began that 
pitiful confession, and he listened; at first walking up 
and down; then coming nearer; sitting beside her; 
then kneeling; then lifting her and holding her against 
his breast. When, relaxing in his arms like a tired child, 
she ended, almost in a whisper, with her timid plea to 
434 


THE IRON WOMAN 

be allowed to stay until morning, the tears dropped down 
his face. 

“ Until morning?” he said, with a laugh that broke into 
a sob—“until death!” 

Long before this his first uneasiness, at the situation—■ 
for her sake,—had disappeared. The acquired uneasi¬ 
nesses of convention vanish before the primal realities. 
The long-banked fire had glowed, then broken into 
flames that consumed such chaff as “propriety.” As he 
held her in his arms after that whispered and rambling 
story of despair, he trembled all over. For Elizabeth 
there had never been a single moment of conventional 
consciousness; she was solemnly unaware of everything 
but the fact that they were together for this last mo¬ 
ment. When he said “until death,” she lifted her head 
and looked at him. 

“Yes,” she said, '' until death y 

Something in her broken whisper touched him like 
ice. He was suddenly rigid. “ Elizabeth, where did you 
mean to go to-morrow morning?” She made no answer, 
but he felt that she was alert. “Elizabeth! Tell me! 
what do you mean?” His loud and terrified command 
made her quiver; she was bewildered by the unexpected¬ 
ness of his suspicion, but too dulled and stunned to evade 
it. David, with his ear close to her lips, raised his 
head. “Elizabeth, don’t you understand? Dear, this 
is life, not death, for us both.” 

She drew away from him with a long sigh, struggling 
up feebly out of his arms and groping for her chair; she 
shook her head, smiling faintly. “I’m sorry you 
guessed. No, I can’t go on living. There’s no use talk¬ 
ing about it, David. I can’t.” 

He stood looking down at her, pale from the shock of 
his discovery. “Listen to me, Elizabeth: you belong 
to me. Don’t you understand, dear? You always have 
belonged to me. He knew it when he stole you from 
yourself, as well as from me. You have always been 

43 .^ 


THE IRON WOMAN 


mine. You have come back to me. Do you think I 
will let Blair Maitland or death or God Almighty, steal 
you now? Never. You belong to me! to me!** 

“But—” she began. 

“Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call 
right and wrong? ‘Right’ is being together!” 

She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been 
thinking of “right and wrong”; her mind had been ab¬ 
sorbed b}^ the large and simple necessity of death. But 
his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring her organic im¬ 
pulse, was already splitting hairs to justify an organic 
impulse of his own. 

“God gave you to me,” he said, “and by God I’ll keep 
you! That’s what is right; if we parted now it would 
be wrong.” 

It seemed as if the gale of passion which had been 
slowly rising in him in these hours they had been together 
blew away the mists in which her mind had been groping, 
blew away the soothing fogs of death which had been 
closing in about her, and left her, shrinking, in sudden, 
confusing light. 

“Wrong?” she said, dazed; “I hadn’t thought about 
that. David, I wouldn’t have come to you except—■ 
except because it was the end. Anything else is im¬ 
possible, you know.” 

“Why?” he demanded. 

“I am married,” she said, bewildered. 

He laughed under his breath. “Blair Maitland will 
«ake his own medicine, now,” he said;—“you are mar¬ 
ried to ynep* 

The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, 
struck some answering chord in her mind, for while 
mechanically she contradicted him, some deeper self was 
saying, “yes; yes.” 

But aloud she said, “It can’t be, David; don’t you 
see it can’t be ?” 

“But it is already; I will never let you go. I’ve got 


THE IRON WOMAN 


you—at last. Elizabeth, listen to me, while youVe 
been talking, I’ve thought it all out: as things are, I 
don’t think you can possibly get a divorce from Blair 
and marry me. He’s ‘kind’ to you, you say; and he’s 
‘decent,’ and he doesn’t drink—and so forth and so 
forth. I know the formula to keep a woman with a 
man she hates and call it being respectable. No, you 
can’t get a divorce from him; but he can get a divorce 
from you ... if you give him the excuse to do so.” 

Elizabeth looked at him with perfectly uncompre¬ 
hending eyes. The innocence of them did not touch 
him. For the second time in her life she was at the 
mercy of Love. ‘‘Blair is fond of me,” she said; ‘‘he 
never would give me a divorce. He has told me so a 
hundred times. Do you suppose I haven’t begged him 
to let me go ? On my knees I begged him. No, David, 
there is no way out except—” 

‘‘There is a way out if you love me enough to—come 
to me. Then,” he said in a whisper, ‘‘ he will divorce you 
and we can be married. Oh, Elizabeth, death is not the 
way out; it is life, dear, life! Will you live? Will you 
give me life ?” He was breathing as if he had been run¬ 
ning; he held her fingers against his lips until he bruised 
them. 

She understood. After a minute of silence she said, 
faintly: ‘‘As for me, nothing matters. Even if it is 
wicked—” 

‘‘It is not wicked!” 

‘‘Well, if it were, if you wanted me I would come. 
I don’t seem to care. Nothing seems to me wrong in the 
whole world. And nothing right. Do you understand, 
David? I am—done. My life is worthless, anyhow. 
Use it—^and throw it away. But it would ruin you. 
No, I won’t do it.” 

‘‘Ruin me? It would make me! I have shriveled, I 
have starved, I have frozen without you. Ask my 
mother if what I tell you isn’t true.” 

437 


THE IRON WOMAN 


She caught her breath and drew away from him. 
“ Your mother!” she said, faintly. But he did not notice 
the recoil. 

“ It would end your career,” she said. She was con¬ 
fused by the mere tumult of his words. 

“Career! The only career I want is you. Medicine 
isn’t the only thing in the world, nor Philadelphia the 
only place to practise it. And if I can’t be a doctor, I 
can break stones for my wife. Elizabeth, to love you is 
the only career I want. But you—can you? Am 1 
asking more than you can give? Do you care what 
people say? We may not be able to be married for a 
year. Longer, perhaps; the law takes time. They will 
call it disgrace, you know, the people who don’t know 
what love means. Could you bear that—for me? Do 
you love me enough for that, Elizabeth?” 

His voice was hoarse with passion. He was on his 
knees beside her, his face hot against hers, his arms 
around her. Not only his bitterly thought-out theories 
of individualism, but all his years of decent living, con¬ 
tributed to his overthrow at that moment. He was a 
man; and here was his woman, who had been tom 
from him by a thief: she had come back to him, she 
had toiled back through the storm, she had fought 
back through cruel and imprisoning ties that had held 
her for nearly three years; should he not keep her, now 
that she had come ? The cave-dweller in him cried out 
**Yes!'* To let her go now, would be to loosen his fingers 
just as they gripped the neck of the thief who had 
robbed him! In the madness of that moment of hate and 
love, his face on hers, his arms around her, David did not 
know that his tears were wet on her lips. 

“Mine,” he said, panting; ''mine! my own has come 
back to me. Say so; tell me so yourself. Say it! I 
want to hear you say it.” 

“Why David, I have always been yours. But I am 
not worth taking. I am not—” 

438 


IHE IRON WOMAN 


“Hush! You are mine. They shall never part us 
again. Elizabeth—to-morrow we will go away.” She 
sank against him in silence; for a while he was silent, 
too. Then, in a low voice, he told her how they must 
carry out a plan which had sprung, full-winged, from his 
mind; “when he knows you have been here to-night,” 
David said,—and trembled from head to foot; “he will 
divorce you.” 

She listened, assenting, but bewildered. “ I was going 
to die,” she said, faintly; “I don’t know how to live. 
Oh, I think the other way would be better.” 

But he did not stop to discuss it; he had put her back 
into the reclining chair—once in a while the physician 
remembered her fatigue, though for the most part the 
lover thought only of himself; he saw how white she was, 
and put her in the big chair; then, drawing up a foot¬ 
stool, he sat down, keeping her hand in his; sometimes 
he kissed it, but all the time he talked violently of right 
and wrong. Elizabeth was singularly indifferent to his 
distinctions; perhaps the deep and primitive experience 
of looking into the face of Death made her so. At any 
rate, her question was not “ Is it right ?” it was only “ Is 
it best ?” Was it best for him to do this thing ? Would 
it not injure him ? David, brushing away her objections 
with an exultant belief in himself, was far less elemental. 
Right? What made right and wrong? Law? Eliza¬ 
beth knew better! Unless she meant God’s law. As 
far as that went, she was breaking it if she went on living 
with Blair. As for dying, she had no right to die! She 
was his. Would she rob him again ? 

It was all the everlasting, perfectly sincere sophistry of 
the man who has been swept past honor and prudence 
and even pity, that poured from David’s lips; and with 
it, love! love! love! Elizabeth, listening to it, carried 
along by it, had, in the extraordinary confusion of the 
moment, nothing to oppose to it but her own unworth. 
To this he refused to listen, closing her lips with his own, 

439 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and then going on with his quite logical reasoning. His 
niind was alert to meet and arrange every difficulty and 
every detail; once, half laughing, he stopped to say, 
“We’ll have to live on your money, Elizabeth. See 
what I’ve come to!” The old scruples seemed, beside 
this new reality, merely ridiculous—although there was 
a certain satisfaction in throwing overboard that hid¬ 
eous egotism of his, which had made all the trouble that 
had come to them. “ You see,” he explained, “we shall 
go away for a while, until you get your divorce. And it 
will take time to pick up a practice, especially, in a new 
place. So you will probably have to support me,” he 
ended, smiling. But she was too much at peace in the 
haven of his clasping arms even to smile. Once, when 
he confessed his shame at having doubted her—“for I 
did,” he said; “I actually thought you cared for him!” 
she roused herself: “It was my fault. I won’t let you 
blame yourself; it was all my fault!” she said; then sank 
again into dreaming quiet. 

It was midnight; the fire had died down; a stick of 
drift-wood on the iron dogs, gnawed through by shim¬ 
mering blue and copper flames, broke apart, and a shower 
of sparks flew up, caught in the soot, and smoldered in 
spreading rosettes on the chimney-back. The night, 
pressing black against the windows, was full of the mur - 
murous silence of the rain and the soft advancing crash 
of the incoming tide; the man and woman were silent, 
too. Sometimes he would kiss the little scar on her wrist; 
sometimes press his lips into the soft cup of her palm; 
there seemed no need of words. It was in one of these si¬ 
lences that David suddenly raised his head and frowned. 

“Listen!” he said; then a moment later: “wheels! 
heref at this time of night!” 

Elizabeth crouched back in her chair. “It is Blair. 
He has followed me—” 

“ No, no; it is somebody who has lost his way in the 
rain. Yes, I hear him; he is coming in to ask the road.” 

440 


THE IRON WOMAN 


There were hurried steps on the porch, and Elizabeth 
grew so deadly white that David said again, reassun 
ingly: “It’s some passer-by. I’ll send him about his 
business.” 

Loud, vehement knocking interrupted him, and he 
said, cheerfully: “Confound them, making such a noise! 
Don’t be frightened; it is only some farmer—” 

He took up a lamp and, closing the door of the living- 
room behind him, went out into the hall; some one, who¬ 
ever it was, was fumbling with the knob of the front door 
as if in terrible haste. David slipped the bolt and would 
have opened the door, but it seemed to burst in, and 
against it, clinging to the knob, panting and terrified, 
stood his mother. 

“David! Is she— Am I too late? David I Where 
is Elizabeth ? Am I too late?** 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 


The rainy dawn which Elizabeth had seen glimmering 
in the steam and smoke of the railroad station filtered 
wanly through Mercer’s yellow fog. In Mrs. Maitland’s 
office-dining-room the gas, burning in an orange halo, 
threw a livid light on the haggard faces of four people 
who had not slept that night. 

When Blair had come frantically back from his fruit¬ 
less quest at the hotel to say, “Is she here, nowf' Mrs. 
Richie had sent him at once to Mr. Ferguson, who, 
roused from his bed, instantly took command. 

“Tell me just what has happened, please?’’ he said. 

Blair, almost in collapse, told the story of the after¬ 
noon, He held nothing back. In the terror that con¬ 
sumed him, he spared himself nothing; he had made 
Elizabeth angry; frightfully angry. But she didn’t show 
it; she had even said she was not angry. But she said— 
and he repeated that sword-like sentence about “David’s 
money and David’s wife.” Then, almost in a whisper, 
he added her question about—drowning. “She has—” 
he said; he did not finish the sentence. 

Robert Ferguson made no comment, but his face 
quivered. “Have you a carriage?’’ he asked, shrugging 
into his overcoat. Blair nodded, and they set out. 

It was after five when they came back to Mrs. Mait¬ 
land’s dining-room, where the gaslight struggled in¬ 
effectually with the fog. They had done everything 
which, at that hour, could be done. 

“Oh, when will it ever get light!” Blair said, despair¬ 
ingly. He pushed aside the food Nannie had placed on 
442 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the table for them, and dropped his face on his arms. 
He had a sudden passionate longing for his mother; she 
would have done something! She would have told these 
people, these dazed, terrified people! what to do. She 
always knew what to do. For the first time in his life he 
needed his mother, 

Robert Ferguson, standing at the window, was staring 
out at the blind, yellow mist. “As soon as it’s light 
enough, we’ll get a boat and go down the river,” he said, 
with heavy significance. 

“But it is absurd to jump at such a conclusion,” Mrs. 
Richie protested. 

“You don’t know her,” Elizabeth’s uncle said, briefly. 

Blair echoed the words. “No; you don’t know her.’ 

“All the same, I don’t believe it!” Mrs. Richie said, 
emphatically. “For one thing, Blair says that her 
comb and brush are not on her bureau. A girl doesn’t 
take her toilet things with her when she goes out to—’ 

“Elizabeth might,” Mr. Ferguson said. 

Blair, looking up, broke out: “Oh, that money! It’s 
that that has made all the trouble. Why did I say 1 
wouldn’t give it up? I’d throw it into the fire, if it 
would bring her back to me!” 

Mrs. Richie was silent. Her face was tense with 
anxiety, but it was not the same anxiety that plowed 
the other faces. “Did you go to the depot?” she said. 
“Perhaps she took the night train. The ticket-agent 
might have seen her.” 

“But why should she take a night train?” Blair said; 
“where would she go?” 

“Why should she do a great many things she has 
done?” Mrs. Richie parried; and added, softly, “I want 
to speak to you, Blair; come into the parlor for a min¬ 
ute.” When they were alone, she said,—her eyes avoid¬ 
ing his; “I have an idea that she has gone to Phila^ 
delphia. To see me.” 

“ You ? But you are here!” 

443 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“ Yes ; but perhaps she thought I went home yester¬ 
day; you thought so.” 

Blair grasped at a straw of hope. “ I will telegraph—” 

“ No; that would be of no use. The servants couldn’t 
answer it; and—and there is no one else there. I will 
take the morning express, and telegraph you as soon as 
I get home.” 

“But I can’t wait all day!” he said; “I will wire—” 
he paused; it struck him like a blow that there was only 
one person to whom to wire. The blood rushed to his 
face. “ You think that she has gone to him?” 

“I think she has gone to me,” she told him, coldly. 
“What more natural? I am an old friend, and she was 
angry with you.” 

“Yes; she was, but—” 

“As for my son,” said Mrs. Richie, “he is not at home; 
but I assure you,”—she stumbled a little over this; “I 
assure you that if he were he would have no desire to see 
your wife.” 

Blair was silent. Then he said, in a smothered voice: 
“ If she is at your house, tell her I won’t keep the money. 
I’ll make Nannie build a hospital with it; or I’ll ... . tell 
her, if she will only just come back to me. I’ll—’* He 
could not go on. 

“Blair,” Robert Ferguson said, from the doorway, 
“it is light enough now to get a boat.” 

Blair nodded. “ If she has gone to you, if she is alive,” 
he said, “tell her I’ll give him the money.” 

Helena Richie lifted her head with involuntary hau¬ 
teur. “ My son has no interest in your money I” 

“Oh,” he said, brokenly, “you can’t seem to think of 
anything but his quarrel with me. Somehow, all that 
^ seems so unimportant now! Why, Fd ask David to help 
me, if I could reach him.” He did not see her relenting, 
outstretched hand; for the first time in a life starved for 
want of the actualities of pain, Blair was suffering; he 
forgot embarrassment, he even forgot hatred; he touched 
444 


THE IRON WOMAN 


fundamentals: the need of help and the instinctive 
reliance upon friendship. “David would help me!” he 
said, passionately; “or my mother would know what to 
do; but you people—” He dashed after Mr. Ferguson, 
and a moment later Mrs. Richie heard the carriage rattling 
down the street; the two men were going to the river to 
begin their heart-sickening search. 

It was then that she started upon a search of her own. 
She made a somewhat lame excuse to Nannie—Nannie 
was the last person to be intrusted with Helena Richie’s 
fears! Then she took the morning express across the 
mountains. She sat all day in fierce alternations of 
hope and angry concern: Surely Elizabeth was alive; 
but suppose she was alive — with David! David’s 
mother, remembering what he had said to her that 
Sunday afternoon on the beach, knew, in the bottom 
of her heart, that she would rather have Elizabeth 
dead than alive under such conditions. Her old mis¬ 
givings began to press upon her: the conditions might 
have held no danger for him if he had had a different 
mother! She found herself remembering, with anguish, 
a question that had been asked her very long ago, when 
David was a little boy: Can you make him brave; can 
you make him honorable; can you —“I’ve tried, oh, I 
have tried,” she said; “but perhaps Dr. Lavendar ought 
not to have given him to me!” It was an unendurable idea; 
she drove it out of her mind, and sat looking at the mist- 
enfolded mountains, struggling to decide between a hope 
that implied a fear and a fear that destroyed a hope; 
—but every now and then, under both the hope and the 
fear, came a pang of memory that sent the color into her 
face: Robert Ferguson’s library; his words; his kiss... . 

As the afternoon darkened into dusk, through sheer 
fatigue she relaxed into certainty that both the hope 
and the fear were baseless: Elizabeth had not gone to 
David; she couldn’t have done such an insane thing! 
David’s mother began to be sorry she had suggested 

445 


THE IRON WOMAN 


to Blair that his wife might be in Philadelphia. She 
began to wish she had stayed in Mercer, and not left 
them all to their cruel anxiety. “If she has done 
what they think, I’ll go back to-morrow. Robert will 
need me, and David would want me to go back.’' It 
occurred to her, with a lift of joy, that she might possibly 
find David at home. Owing to the bad weather, he 
might not have gone down to the beach to close the 
cottage as he had written her he meant to do. She 
wondered how he would take this news about Elizabeth. 
For a moment she almost hoped he would not be at home, 
so that she need not tell him. “ Oh,” she said to herself, 
“when will he get over her cruelty to him?” As she 
gathered up her wraps to leave the car, she wondered 
whether human creatures ever did quite “get over” the 
catastrophes of life. “Have I? And I am fifty,—and 
it was twenty years ago!” 

When with a lurch the cab drew up against the curb, 
her glance at the unlighted windows of her parlor made 
her sigh with relief; there was nobody there! Yes; she 
had certainly been foolish to rush off across the moun¬ 
tains, and leave those poor, distressed people in Mercer. 

“The doctor is at Little Beach, I suppose?” she said 
to the woman who answered her ring; “By-the-way, 
Mary, no one has been here to-day? No lady to see 
me?” 

“There was a lady to see the doctor; she was just 
possessed to see him. I told her he was down at the 
beach, and she was that upset,” Mary said, smiling, 
“you’d ’a’ thought there wasn’t another doctor in 
Philadelphia!” Patients were still enough of a rarity 
to interest the whole friendly household. 

“Who was she? What was she like? Did she give 
her name?” Mrs. Richie was breathless; the servant 
was startled at the change in her; fear, like a tangible 
thing, leaped upon her and shook her. 

“Who was she?” Mrs. Richie said, fiercely. 

446 


THE IRON WOMAN 


The surprised woman, giving the details of that early 
call, was, of course, ignorant of the lady’s name; but 
after the first word or two David’s mother knew it. 
“Bring me a time-table. Never mind my supper! I 
must see the lady. I think I know who she was. She 
wanted to see me, and I must find her. I know where 
she has gone. Hurry! Where is the new time-table ?” 

“She didn’t ask for you, ’m,” the bewildered maid 
assured her. 

Mrs. Richie was not listening; she was turning the 
leaves of the Pathfinder with trembling fingers; the 
trains had been changed on the little branch road, but 
somehow she must get there,— to-nightF' she said to her¬ 
self. To find a train to Normans was an immense relief, 
though it involved a fourteen-mile drive to Little Beach. 
She could not reach them (“them!” she was sure of it 
now), she could not reach them until nearly twelve, but 
she would be able to say that Elizabeth had spent the 
night with her. 

The hour before, the train started for Normans seemed 
endless to Helena Richie. She sent a despatch to Blair 
to say: 

“/ have found her. Do not come for her yet. This 
is imperative. Will telegraph you to-morrow 

After that she walked about, up and down, some¬ 
times stopping to look out of the window into the rain¬ 
swept street, sometimes pausing to pick up a book but 
though she turned over the pages, she did net knov/ 
what she read. She debated constantly whether she 
had done well to telegraph Blair. Suppose, in spite of 
her command, he should rush right on to Philadelphia, 
“then what!” she said to herself, frantically. If he 
found that Elizabeth had followed David down to the 
cottage, what would he do ? There would be a scandal! 
And it was not David’s fault—she had followed him; 
how like her to follow him, careless of everything but 
her own whim of the moment! She would have recalled 
29 447 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the despatch if she could have done so. “If Robert were 
only here to tell me what to do!” she thought, realizing, 
even in her cruel alarm, how greatly she depended on 
him. Suddenly she must have realized something else, 
for a startled look came into her eyes. “No! of course 
I’m not,” she said; but the color rose in her face. The 
revelation was only for an instant; the next moment she 
was tense with anxiety and counting the minutes before 
she could start for the station. 

It was a great relief when she found herself at last on 
the little local train, rattling out into the rainy night. 
When she reached Normans it was not easy to get a 
carriage to go to Little Beach. No depot hack-driver 
would consider such a drive on such a night. She found 
her way through the rainy streets to a livery-stable, and 
standing in the doorway of a little office that smelled of 
harnesses and horses, she bargained with a reluctant 
man, who, though polite enough to take his feet from 
his desk and stand up before a lady, told her point-blank 
that there wasn’t no money, no, nor no woman, that he’d 
drive twenty-eight miles for—down to the beach and 
back; on no such night as this; “but maybe one of my 
men might, if you’d make it worth his while,” he said, 
doubtfully. 

“ I will make it worth his while,” Mrs. Richie said. 

“There’s a sort of inlet between us and the beach, 
kind of a river, like; you’ll have to ferry over,” the man 
warned her. 

“Please get the carriage at once,” she said. 

So the long drive began. It was very dark. At times 
the rain sheeted down so that little streams of water 
dripped upon her from the top of the carryall, and the 
side curtains flapped so furiously that she could scarcely 
hear the driver grumbling that if he’d ’a’ knowed what 
kind of a night it was he wouldn’t have undertook the 
job. 

“ I’ll pay you double your price,” she said in a lull of 
448 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the storm; and after that there was only the sheeting 
rain and the tugging splash of mud-loaded fetlocks. At 
the ferry there was a long delay. “The ferry-man’s 
asleep, I guess,” the driver told her; certainly there was 
no light in the little weather-beaten house on the river- 
bank. The man clambered out from under the streaming 
rubber apron of the carryall, and handing the wet reins 
back to her to hold—“that horse takes a notion to run 
sometim'es,” he said, casually; made his way to the 
ferry-house. “Come out!” he said, pounding on the 
door; “tend to your business! there’s a lady wants to 
cross!” 

The ferry-man had his opinion of ladies who wanted 
to do such things in such weather; but he came, after 
what seemed to the shivering passenger an interminable 
time, and the carryall was driven onto the flat-bottomed 
boat. A minute later the creak of the cable and the 
slow rock of the carriage told her they had started. It 
was too dark to see anything, but she could hear the 
sibilant slap of the water against the side of the scow 
and the brush of rain on the river. Once the dripping 
horse shook himself, and the harness rattled and the old 
hack quivered on its sagging springs. She realized that 
she was cold; she could hear the driver and the ferry¬ 
man talking; there was the blue spurt of a match, and 
a whiff of very bad tobacco from a pipe. Then a dash 
of rain blew in her face, and the smell of the pipe was 
washed out of the air. 

It was after twelve when, stumbling up the path to her 
own house, she leaned against the door awaiting David’s 
ansv^er to her knock; when he opened it to the gust of 
wet wind and her drawn, white face, he was stunned 
with astonishment. He never knew what answer he 
made to those first broken, frantic words; as for her, 
she did not wait to hear his answer. She ran past him 
and burst into the fire-lit silence that was still tingling 
with emotion. She saw Elizabeth rising, panic-stricken, 
449 


THE IRON WOMAN 


from her chair. Clutching her shoulder, she looked hard 
into the younger woman’s face; then, with a great sigh, 
she sank down into a chair. 

“Thank God!’’ she said, faintly. 

David, following her, stammered out, “How did you 
get here?” The full, hot torrent of passion of only a 
moment before had come to a crashing standstill. He 
could hardly breathe with the suddenness of it. His 
thoughts galloped. He heard his own voice as if it had 
been somebody else’s, and he was conscious of his 
foolishness in asking his question; what difference did it 
make how she got here! Besides, he knew how: she 
had come over the mountains that day, taken the even¬ 
ing train for Normans, and driven down here, fourteen 
miles—in this storm! “You must be worn out,” he 
said, involuntarily. 

“ I am in time; nothing else matters. David, go and 
pay the man. Here is my purse.” 

He glanced at Elizabeth, hesitated, and went. The 
two women, alone, looked at each other for a speechless 
instant. 


CHAPTER XXXIX 


“You ought not to be here, you know,” Helena 
Richie said, in a low voice. 

Elizabeth was silent. 

“They are all very much frightened about you at 
home.” 

“I am sorry they are frightened.” 

“Your coming might be misunderstood,” David's 
mother said; her voice was very harsh; the gentle 
loveliness of her face had changed to an incredible harsh¬ 
ness. “I shall say I was here with you, of course; but 
you are insane, Elizabeth! you are insane to be here!” 

“Mother,” David said, quietly, “you mustn’t find 
fault with Elizabeth.” He had come back, and even as 
he spoke retreating wheels were heard. They were 
alone, these three; there was no world to any of them 
outside that fire-lit room, encompassed by night, the 
ocean, and the storm. “Elizabeth did exactly right to 
come down here to—to consult me,” David said; “but 
we won't talk about it now; it’s too late, and you are 
too tired.” 

Then turning to Elizabeth, he took her hand. “ Won’t 
you go up-stairs now? You are as tired as Materna! 
But she must have something to eat before she goes to 
bed.” Still holding her hand, he opened the door for 
her. “You know the spare room? I’m afraid it’s 
rather in disorder, but you will find some blankets and 
things in the closet.” 

Elizabeth hesitated; then obeyed him. 

David was entirely self-possessed by this time; in 

451 


THE IRON WOMAN 


that moment while he stood in the rain, counting out the 
money from his mother’s purse for the driver, and telling 
the man of a short cut across the dunes, the emotion 
of a moment before cooled into grim alertness to 
meet the emergency: there must be no scene. To avoid 
the possibility of such a thing, he must get Elizabeth 
out of the room at once. As he slipped the bolt on 
the front door and hurried back to the living room, he 
said a single short word between his teeth. But he was 
not angry; he was only irritated—as one might be 
irritated at a good child whose ignorant innocence led it 
into meddling with matters beyond its comprehension. 
And he was not apprehensive; his mother’s coming could 
not alter anything; it was merely an embarrassment 
and distress. What on earth should he do with her the 
next morning! “I’ll have to lie to her,’’ he thought, in 
consternation. David had never lied to his mother, and 
even in this self-absorbed moment he shrank from doing 
so. He was keenly disturbed, but as the door closed 
upon Elizabeth he spoke quietly enough: “You are very 
tired, Materna; don’t let’s get to discussing things to¬ 
night. I’ll bring you something to eat, and then you 
must go up to your room.” 

“There is nothing to discuss, David,” she said; “of 
course Elizabeth ought not to have come down here to 
you. But I am here. To-morrow she will go home with 
me. 

She had taken off her bonnet, and with one unsteady 
hand she brushed back the tendrils of her soft hair that 
the rain had tightened into curls all about her temples; 
the glow in her cheeks from the cold air was beginning to 
die out, and he saw, suddenly, the suffering in her eyes. 
But for the first time in his life David Richie was indiffer¬ 
ent to pain in his mother’s face; that calm declaration 
that Elizabeth would go home with her, brushed the 
habit of tenderness aside and stung him into argument— 
which a moment later he regretted. 

452 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“You say she’ll *go home.’ Do you mean that you 
mil take her back to Blair Maitland?” 

“I hope she will go to her husband.” 

“Why?” He was standing before her, his shoulder 
against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets; his 
attitude was careless, but his face was alert and hard; 
she no longer seemed a meddlesome good child; she was 
his mother, interfering in what was not her business. 
“Why?” he repeated. 

“Because he is her husband,” Helena Richie said. 

“ You know how he became her husband; he took ad¬ 
vantage of an insane moment. The marriage has ended.” 

“Marriage can’t end, David. Living together may 
end; but Blair is not unkind to Elizabeth; he is not un¬ 
faithful; he is not unloving—” 

“No, my God! he is not. My poor Elizabeth!” 

His mother, looking at the suddenly convulsed face 
before her, knew that it was useless to pretend that 
this was only a matter of preserving appearances by 
her presence. “David,” she said, “what do you mean 
by that?” 

“I mean that she has done with that thief.” As he 
spoke it flashed into his mind that perhaps it was best to 
have things out with her now; then in the morning he 
would arrange it, somehow, so that she and Elizabeth 
should not meet;—for Elizabeth must not hear talk like 
this. Not that he was afraid of its effect; certainly this 
soft, sweet mother of his could not do what he had de¬ 
clared neither Blair Maitland, nor death, nor God him¬ 
self could accomplish! But her words would make 
Elizabeth uncomfortable; so he had better tell her 
now, and get it over. In the midst of his own discom¬ 
fort, he realized that this would spare him the necessity 
of a lie the next morning; and he was conscious of relief 
at that. “Mother,” he said, gently, “I was going to 
write to you about it, but perhaps I had better tell you 
now, . , . She is coming to me.” 

453 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Coming to you!” 

He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his; 
the terror in her face made him wince. For a moment he 
wished he had not undertaken to tell her; a letter would 
have been better. On paper, he could have reasoned it 
out calmly; now, her quivering face distressed him so 
that he hardly knew what he said. 

“Materna, I am awfully sorry to pain you! I do 
wish you would realize that things have to be this way.” 

“What way?” 

“She and I have to be together,” he said, simply. 
“She belongs to me. When I keep her from going 
back to Blair I merely keep my own. Mother, can’t you 
understand? there is something higher than man’s 
law, which ties a woman to a man she hates; there is 
God’s law, which gives her to the man she loves! Oh, I 
am sorry you came to-night! To-morrow I would have 
written to you. You don’t know how distressed I am 
to pain you, but—poor mother!” 

She had sunk back in her chair with a blanched face. 
She said, faintly, ''David!'' 

" Don’t let’s talk about it, Materna,” he said, pitifully. 
He could not bear to look at her; it seemed as if she had 
grown suddenly old; she was broken, haggard, with 
appalled eyes and trembling lips. “You don’t under¬ 
stand,” David said, greatly distressed. 

Helena Richie put her hands over her face. “ Don’t 
I?” she said. There was a long pause; he took her hand 
and stroked it gently; but in spite of tenderness for her 
he was thinking of that other hand, young and thrilling 
to his own, which he had held an hour before; his lips 
stung at the memory of it; he almost forgot his mother, 
cowering in her chair. Suddenly she spoke: 

“Well, David, what do you propose to do? After 
you have seduced another man’s wife and branded 
Elizabeth with a—a dreadful name—” 

Sis pity broke like a bubble; he struck the arm of his 
454 


THE IRON WOMAN 


chair with a clenched hand. “You must not use such 
words to me! I will not listen to words that soil your 
lips and my ears! Will you leave this room or shall I?” 

“Answer my question first: what do you mean to do 
after you have taken Elizabeth?” 

“I shall marry her, of course. He will divorce her, 
and we shall be married.” He was trembling with in¬ 
dignation: “I will not submit to this questioning,” 
he said. He got up and opened the door. “Will you 
leave me, please?” he said, frigidly. 

But she did not rise. She was bending forward, her 
hands gripped between her knees. Then, slowly, she 
raised her bowed head and there was authority in her 
face. “Wait. You must listen. You owe it to me to 
listen.” 

He hesitated. “I owe it to myself not to listen to 
such words as you used a moment ago.” He was stand¬ 
ing before her, his arms folded across his breast; there 
was no son’s hand put out now to touch hers. 

“I won’t repeat them,” she said, “although I don’t 
know any others that can be used when a man takes an¬ 
other man’s wife, or when a married woman goes away 
with a man who is not her husband.” 

“You drag me into an abominable position in making 
me even defend myself. But I will defend myself. I 
will explain to you that, as things are, Elizabeth cannot 
get a divorce from Blair Maitland. But if she leaves him 
for me, he will divorce her; and w^e can marry.” 

“Perhaps he will not divorce her.” 

“You mean out of revenge? I doubt if even he could 
be such a brute as that.” 

“There have been such brutes.” 

“Very well; then we will do without his divorce! 
We will do without the respectability that you think 
so much of.” 

“Nobody can do without it very long,” she said, 
mildly. “But we won’t argue about respectability; 

455 


THE IRON WOMAN 


and I won’t even ask you whether you will marry her, il 
she gets her divorce.” 

His indignation paused in sheer amazement. “No,” 
he said. “I should hardly think that even you would 
venture to ask me such a question!” 

“ I will only ask you, my son, if you have thought how 
you would smirch her name by such a process of getting 
possession of her?” 

“Oh,” he said, despairingly, “what is the use of talk¬ 
ing about it ? I can’t make you understand 1” 

“Have you considered that you will ruin Elizabeth?” 
she insisted. 

“You may call happiness ‘ruin,’ if you want to, 
mother. We don’t—she and I.” 

“I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I told you it 
wouldn’t be happiness?” 

Her question was too absurd to answer. Besides, he 
was determined not to argue with her; argument would 
only prolong this futile and distressing interview. So, 
holding in the leash of respect for her, contempt for her 
opinions, he listened with strained and silent patience 
to what she had to say of duty and endurance. It all 
belonged, he thought, to her generation and to her 
austere goodness; but from his point of view it was 
childish. When at last he spoke, in answer to an in¬ 
sistent question as to whether Elizabeth realized how 
society would regard her course, his voice as well as his 
words showed his entire indifference to her whole argu¬ 
ment. “Yes,” he said; “I have pointed out to Eliza¬ 
beth the fact that though our course will be in accord¬ 
ance with a Law that is infinitely higher than the laws 
that you think so much of, there will be, as you say, 
people to throw mud at her.” 

“A ‘higher law,”’ she said, slowly. “I have heard 
of the ‘higher law,’ David.” 

“That Elizabeth will obey it for me, that she is willing 
to expose herself to the contempt of little minds, makes 
456 


THE IRON WOMAN 


me adore her! And I am willing, I love her enough, to 
accept her sacrifice—" 

“Though you did not love her enough to accept the 
trifling matter of her money ?” his mother broke in. 

Sarcasm from her was so totally unexpected that for a 
moment he did not realize that his armor had been 
pierced. “God knows I believe it is for her happiness,^ 
he said; then, suddenly, his face began to burn, and in an 
instant he was deeply angry. 

“David,” she said, “you seem very sure of God; 
you speak His name very often. Have you really con¬ 
sidered Him in your plan ?” 

He smothered an impatient exclamation; “Mother, 
that sort of talk means nothing to me; and apparently 
my reason for my course means nothing to you. I can’t 
make you understand—” 

“ I don’t need you to make me understand,” she inter¬ 
rupted him; “and your reason is older than you are; 
I guess it is as old as human nature: You want to be 
happy. That is your reason, David; nothing else.” 

“Well, it satisfies us,” he said, coldly; “I wish you 
wouldn’t insist upon discussing it, mother, you are tired, 
and—” 

“Yes, I am tired,” she said, with a gasp. “David, if 
you will promise me not to speak to Elizabeth of this 
until you and I can talk it over quietly—” 

“Elizabeth and I are going away together, to-mor¬ 
row.” 

“You shall not do it!” she cried. 

His eyes narrowed. “I must remind you,” he said, 
“ that I am not a boy. I will do what seems to me right, 
—right?” he interrupted himself, “why is it you can’t 
see that it is right ? Can’t you realize that /Elizabeth is 
mine? It is amazing to me that you can’t see that 
Nature gives her to me, by a Law that is greater than 
any human law that was ever made!” 

“The animals know that law,” she said. 

457 


THE IRON WOMAN 


He would not hear her: “That unspeakable scoundrel 
stole her; he stole her just as much as if he had drugged 
her and kidnapped her. Yes; I take my own!” 

His voice rang through the house; Elizabeth, in her 
room, shivering with excitement, wondering what they 
were saying, those two—heard the jar of furious sound, 
and crept, trembling, halfway down-stairs. 

“I take my own,” he repeated, “and I will make her 
happy; she belongs in my arms, if, my God! we die the 
next day!” 

“Oh,” said Helena Richie, suddenly sobbing, “what 
am I to do? what am I to do?” As she spoke Elizabeth 
entered. David’s start of dismay, his quick protest, 
“Go back, dear; don’t, don’t get into this!” was domi¬ 
nated by his mother’s cry of relief; she rose from her 
chair and ran to Elizabeth, holding out entreating hands. 
“You will not let him be so mad, Elizabeth? You will 
not let him be so bad?” 

“Mother, for Heaven’s sake, stop!” David implored 
her; “this is awful!” 

“ He is not bad,” Elizabeth said, in a low voice, passing 
those outstretched hands without a look. All her old 
antagonism to an untempted nature seemed to leap into 
her face. “I heard you talking, and I came down. I 
could not let you reproach David.” 

“Haven’t I the right to reproach him?—^to save him 
from dishonoring himself as well as you ?” 

“You must not use that word!” Elizabeth cried out, 
trembling all over. “ David is not dishonorable.” 

“ Not dishonorable! Do you say there is nothing dis¬ 
honorable in taking the wife of another man?” 

“Elizabeth,” David said, quietly, putting his arm 
around her, “my mother is very excited. We are not 
going to talk any more to-night. Do go up-stairs, dear.” 
His one thought was to get her out of the room; it had 
been dreadful enough to struggle with his mother alone— 
power and passion and youth, against terror and weak* 

458 


THE IRON WOMAN 


ness. But to struggle in Elizabeth’s presence would be 
shocking. Not, he assured himself, that he had the 
slightest misgiving as to the effect upon her of the argu¬ 
ments to which he had been obliged to listen, but . . . 

“Do leave us, dearest,” he said, in a low voice; the 
misgiving which he denied had driven the color out of his 
face. 

His mother raised her hand with abrupt command: 
“No, Elizabeth must hear what I have to say.” She 
heard it unmoved; the entreaty not to wound her uncle’s 
love, and hurt Nannie’s pride, and betray old Miss 
White’s trust, did not touch her. All she said was, “I 
am sorry; but I can’t help it. David wants me.” 

Then Helena Richie turned again to her son. “ How 
do you mean to support your mistress, David? Of 
course the scandal will end your career.” 

Instantly Elizabeth quivered; the apprehension in 
her eyes made his words stumble: “There—there are 
other things than my profession. I am not afraid that I 
cannot support my wife.'' 

But that flicker of alarm in Elizabeth’s eyes had 
caught Helena Richie’s attention. “Why, Elizabeth,” 
she said, in an astonished voice. ''You love him!" 
Then she added, simply: “Forgive me.” Her words 
were without meaning to the other two, but they brought 
a burst of hope into her entreaty: “Then you won’t ruin 
him! I know you won’t ruin my boy—if you love him.” 

Elizabeth flinched: “David! I told you—^that is 
what I—” 

He caught her hand and pressed it to his mouth. 
“Darling, she doesn’t understand.” 

“ I do understand!” his mother said. She paused for a 
breathless moment, and stood gripping the table, looking 
with dilating eyes and these two, who, loving each other, 
were yet preparing to murder Love. “I thank God,” 
she said, and the elation in her face was almost joy; 
“ T thank God, Elizabeth, that I understand the disgrace 

459 


THE IRON WOMAN 


such wickedness will bring! No honest man will trust 
him; no decent woman will respect you! And listen, 
Elizabeth: even you will not really trust him; and he 
will never entirely respect you!” 

Elizabeth slowly drew her hand from David’s—^and 
instantly he knew that she was frightened. What! Was 
he to lose her again ? He shook with rage. When under 
that panic storm of words, that menace of distrust and 
disgrace, Elizabeth, in an agony of uncertainty, hid her 
face in her hands, David could have killed the robber who 
was trying to tear her from him. He burst into denun¬ 
ciation of the littleness which could regard their course 
in any other way than he did himself. He had no pity 
because his assailant was his mother. He gave no 
quarter because she was a woman; she was an enemy! 
an enemy who had stolen in out of the night to rob him of 
his lately won treasure. “ Don’t listen to her,” he ended, 
hoarsely; “ she doesn’t know what she is talking 
about!” 

“But, David, that was what I said. I said it would be 
bad for you; she says it will ruin you—” 

“ It is a lie!” he said. 

It was nearly three o’clock. They were all at the 
breaking-point of anger and terror. 

“Elizabeth,” Helena Richie implored, “if you love 
him, are you willing to destroy him? You could not 
bear to have me, his mother, speak of his dishonor; how 
about letting the world speak of it—if you love him?” 

“David,” Elizabeth said again, her shaking hands on 
his arm; “you hear what she says? Perhaps she is 
right. Oh, I think she is right! What shall I do ?” 

The entreaty was the entreaty of a child, a frightened, 
bewildered child. Helena Richie caught her breath; 
for a single strange moment she forgot her agony of fear 
for her son; the woman in her was stronger than the 
mother in her; some obscure impulse ranged her with 
this girl, as if against a common enemy. “My dear. 


THE IRON WOMAN 


my dear!” she said, “he shall not have you. I will save 
you.” 

But Elizabeth was not listening. “David, if I should 
injure you”— 

“You will ruin him,” his mother repeated. 

David gave her a deadly look. “You will kill me, 
Elizabeth, unless you come to me,” he said, roughly. 
“Do you want to rob me again?—You’ve done it once,” 
he reminded her; love made him brutal. 

There was a moment of silence. The eyes of the 
mother and son crossed like swords. Elizabeth, stand¬ 
ing between them, shivered; then slowly she turned to 
David, and held out her hands, her open palms falling at 
her sides with a gesture of complete and pitiful surrender. 
“Very well, David. I won’t do it again. I won’t hurt 
you again. I will do whatever you tell me.” 

David caught her in his arms. His mother trembled 
with despair; the absolute immovability of these two 
was awful! 

“Elizabeth, he is selfish and wicked! David, have 
you no manhood ? Shame on you!” Contempt seemed 
her last resource; it did not touch him. “Wait two days,” 
she implored him; “one day, even—” 

“I told you we are going to-morrow,” he said. He 
was urging Elizabeth gently from the room, but at his 
mother’s voice she paused. 

“Suppose,” Helena Richie was saying—“suppose that 
Blair does not give you a divorce?” 

Elizabeth looked into David’s eyes silently. 

“And,” his mother said, “when David gets tired of 
you—what then?” 

Mother r 

“Men do tire of such women, Elizabeth. What 
then ?” 

“ I am not afraid of that,” the girl said. 

The room was very still. The two looking into each 
other’s eyes needed no words; the battling mother had 

461 


THE IRON WOMAN 


apparently reached the end of effort. Yet it was not the 
end. As she stood there a slow illumination grew in her 
face—the knowledge, tragic and triumphant, that if 
Love would save others, itself it cannot save! . . . “ I’m 
not afraid that he will tire of me,” Elizabeth had said; 
and David’s mother, looking at him with ineffable com¬ 
passion, said, very gently: 

“ I was not afraid of that, once, myself.” 

That was all. She was standing up, clinging to the 
table; her face gray, her chin shaking. They neither of 
them grasped the sense of her words; then suddenly 
David caught his breath: 

“What did you say?” 

“I said—” She stopped. “Oh, my poor David, I 
wouldn’t tell you if I could help it; if only there was any 
other way! But there isn’t. I have tried, oh, I have 
tried every other way.” She put her hands over her 
face for an instant, then looked at him. “David, I said 
that I was not afraid, once, myself, that my lover would 
tire of me.” There was absolute silence in the room. 
“But he did, Elizabeth. He did. He did.” 

Then David said, “ I don’t understand.” 

“Yes, you do; you understand that a man once talked 
to me just as you are talking to Elizabeth; he said he 
would marry me when I got my divorce. I think he 
meant it—just as you mean it, now. At any rate, I be¬ 
lieved him. Just as Elizabeth believes you.” 

David Richie stepped back violently; his whole face 
shuddered. “You?” he said, “my mother? No!— 
no!—no!” 

And his mother, gathering up her strength, cringing 
like some faithful dog struck across the face, pointed at 
him with one shaking hand. 

“Elizabeth, did you see how he looked at me? 
Some day your son will look that way at you” 


CHAPTER XL 


No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands 
was suddenly loud in their ears, but the room was still. 
It was the stillness of finality; David had lost Eliza¬ 
beth. 

He knew it; but he could not have said why he knew 
it. Perhaps none of the great decisions of passion can at 
the moment say “why.” Under the lash of some in¬ 
visible whip, the mind leaps this way or that without 
waiting for the approval of Reason. Certainly David 
did not wait for it to know that all was over between 
him and Elizabeth. He did not reason—he only cringed 
back, his eyes hidden in his bent arm, and gasped out 
those words which, scourging his mother, arraigned him¬ 
self. Nor was there any reason in Elizabeth’s cry of 
“Oh, Mrs. Richie, I love you”; or in her run across the 
room to drop upon the floor beside David’s mother, 
clasping her and pressing her face against the older 
woman’s shaking knees. “I do love you—” Only in 
Helena Richie’s mind could there have been any sort of 
logic. “This,” her ravaged and exalted face seemed to 
say, “this was why he was given to me.” Once he had 
told her that her goodness had saved him; that night 
her goodness had not availed. And God had used her 
sin! Aloud, all that she said was: 

“David, don’t feel so badly. It isn’t as if I were 
your**own mother, you know; you needn't be so un¬ 
happy, David.” Her eyes yearned over him. “You 
won’t do it ?” she said, in a breathless whisper. 

To himself he was saying: “It makes no difference! 

30 463 


THE IRON WOMAN 


What difference can it possibly make? Not a particle, 
not a particle.” Yet some deeper self must have known 
that the difference was made, for at that whispered 
question he seemed to shake his head. But Elizabeth, 
weeping, said: 

“No; we won’t—we won’t! Dear Mrs. Richie, I love 
you. David! Speak to her.” 

He got up wdth a stupid look, then hiS eye fell on his 
mother’s face. “ You are worn out,” he said in a dazed 
way, “ You’ll come up-stairs now? Elizabeth, make her 
go up-stairs.” 

She was worn out; she nodded, with a sort of meek 
obedience, and put out her hand to Elizabeth. David 
opened the door for them and followed them up-stairs. 
Would his mother have this or that? Could he do any¬ 
thing? Nothing, nothing. No, Elizabeth must not 
stay with her, please; she would rather be alone. Ashe 
turned away she called to him, “Elizabeth and I will 
take the noon train, David.” 

And he said, “Yes, I will have a carriage here.” 

The door closed; on one side of it was the mother, 
exhausted almost to unconsciousness, yet elate, remem¬ 
bering no more the anguish for joy of what had been born 
out of it. On the other side these two, still ignorant— 
as the new-born always are—of the future to which that 
travail had pledged them. They stood together in the 
narrow upper hall and their pitiful eyes met in silence. 
Then David took her in his arms and held her for a long 
moment. Then he kissed her. She whispered, “Good- 
by, David.” But he was speechless. He went with her 
to her own door, left her without a word, and went 
down-stairs. 

In the clamorous emptiness of the living-room he 
looked about him; noticed that the table-cover was still 
crumpled from his mother’s hands and smoothed it 
automatically; then he sat down. He had the sensa¬ 
tion, spiritually, that a man might have physically 
464 


THE IRON WOMAN 

whose face had been violently and repeatedly slapped. 
The swiftness of the confounding experiences of the 
last nine hours made him actually dizzy. His thoughts 
rushed to one thing, then to another. Elizabeth? 
No, no; he could not think of her yet. His mother? 
No, he could not think of her, either. It occurred to 
him that he was cold, and getting up abruptly, he went 
to the fireplace, and kicked the charred sticks of drift¬ 
wood together over a graying bed of ashes. Then he heard 
a chair pushed back overhead and a soft, tired step, and 
he wondered vaguely if his mother’s room was comfort¬ 
able. Reaching for the bellows, he knelt down and blew 
the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant 
flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his 
feet and stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his fore¬ 
head on the back of his hand, watching the fire catch and 
crackle into cheerful warmth. He stood there for a long 
time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man, some 
beast, had—my God! wronged Maternal It was the 
first really clear thought; instantly some other thought 
must have sprung up to meet it, for he said, under his 
breath, “No, because I didn’t mean ... it is different 
with tis; quite different!’’ The thought, whatever 
it was, must have persisted, for it stung him into rest¬ 
less movement. He began to walk about; once or 
twice he stumbled over a footstool, that his eyes, looking 
blindly at the floor, apparently did not see. Once he 
stood stock-still, the blood surging in his ears, his face 
darkly red. But his mind was ruthlessly clear. He 
was remembering; he was putting two and two together. 
She was a widow; he knew that. Her marriage had 
been unhappy; he knew that. There had been a man— 
he dimly remembered a man. He had not thought of 
him for twenty years! . . . “Damn him,” David said, 
and the tears stood in his eyes. Then again that thought 
must have come to him, for he said to himself, violently, 
“But I love Elizabeth, it is different with me'” Per- 
465 


THE IRON WOMAN 

haps that persistent inner voice said, “In what way?” 
for he said again, “Entirely different! It is the only 
way to make him divorce her so we can be married.” 
Again he stood still and stared blindly at the floor. That 
a man could live who would be base enough to take 
advantage of— Materna! Between rage and pity, and 
confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the 
whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realiza¬ 
tion that his outcry of dismay at his mother’s confession 
had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let 
her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His 
whole body winced with mortification. It was the first 
prick of the sword of shame—^that sword of the Lord! 
Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust 
came again in a flash of memory. It was only a single 
sentence; neither argument nor entreaty nor remon¬ 
strance; merely the statement of a fact: '*you did not 
love her enough to accept her money'* At the time those 
ironical words were spoken they had scarcely any mean¬ 
ing to him, and what meaning they had was instantly 
extinguished by anger. Now abruptly they reverber¬ 
ated in his ears. He forgot his mother; he forgot the 
“beast,” who was, after all, only the same kind of a 
beast that he was himself. “ You, who could not accept 
a girl’s money could take her good name; could urge 
her to a course which in your mother overwhelms you 
with horror; could ask her to give you that which ranks 
a man who accepted it from your mother as a ‘beast.’ ” 
David had never felt shame before; he had known 
mortification, and regret, too, to a greater or less degree; 
and certainly he had known remorse; he had experi¬ 
enced the futile rage of a man who realizes that he has 
made a fool of himself; these things he had known, 
as every man nearly thirty years old must know 
them. Especially and cruelly he had known them 
when he understood the effect of the reasoning ego¬ 
tism of his letter upon Elizabeth. But the beneficent 
466 


THE IRON WOMAN 


agony of shame he had never known until this mo 
ment. 

In the next hour or two, while the flame of the lamp 
still burning on the table, whitened in the desolating 
morning light that crept into the room, David Richie 
did not reason things out consecutively. His thoughts 
came without apparent sequence; sometimes he won¬ 
dered, dully, if it were still raining; wondered how he 
would get a carriage in the morning; wondered if Eliza¬ 
beth was asleep; wondered if she would go back to Blair 
Maitland? “No, no, no!” he said aloud; “not that; 
that can’t be.” Yet through all this disjointed thought 
his eyes, cleared by shame, saw Reason coming slowly 
up to explain and confirm his conviction that, whatever 
Elizabeth did or did not do, for the present he had lost 
her. And Reason, showing him his likeness to that 
other “beast,” showing him his arrogance to his mother, 
his cruelty to his poor girl, his poor, pitiful Elizabeth! 
showed him something else: his assertions of his intrinsic 
right to Elizabeth—how much of their force was due to 
love for her, how much to hatred of Blair? David’s 
habit of corroborating his emotions by a mental process 
had more than once shackled him and kept him from 
those divine impetuosities that add to the danger and the 
richness of life; but this time the logical habit led him 
inexorably into deeper depths of humiliation. It was 
dawn when he saw that he had hated Blair more than he 
had loved Elizabeth. This was the most intolerable 
revelation of all; he had actually been about to use Love 
to express Hate! 

Up-stairs Elizabeth had had her own vision; it was 
not like David’s. There was no sense of shame. There 
was only Love! Love, pitiful, heart-breaking, remorse¬ 
ful. When David left her she sank down on the edge of 
her bed and cried—not for disappointment or dread or 
perplexity, not for herself, not for David, but for Helena 
Richie. Once she crept across the hall and listened at 

467 


THE IRON WOMAN 


the closed door. Silence. Then she pushed it open and 
listened again. Oh, to go to her, to put her arms about 
her, to say, “ I will be good, I will do whatever you say, 
I love you.” But all was still except for soft, scarcely 
heard, tranquil breathing. For David’s mother slept. 

When Elizabeth came down the next morning it was 
to the crackle of flames and the smell of coffee and the 
sight of David scorching his face over toasting bread. It 
was so unheroic that it was almost heroic, for it meant 
that they could keep on the surface of life. David 
said, simply, “Did you get any sleep, Elizabeth?” and 
she said: “Well, not much. Here, let me make the 
toast; you get something for your mother.” But when 
she carried a little tray of food up to Mrs. Richie, and 
kneeling by the bedside took the soft mother-hand in 
hers, she went below the surface. 

“I am going back to him,” she said; and put Mrs. 
Richie’s hand against her lips. 

David’s mother gave her a long look, but she had 
nothing to say. 

Later, as they came down-stairs together, Eliza¬ 
beth, still holding that gentle hand in hers, felt it tremble 
when Helena Richie met her son. Perhaps his trembled, 
too. Yet his tenderness and consideration for her, as 
he told her how he had arranged for her journey to town 
was almost ceremonious; it seemed as if he dared not 
come too near her. It was not until he was helping her 
into the carriage, that he made any reference to the night 
before: 

“I have given her up,” he said, almost in a whisper, 
“but she can’t go back to him, you know—that can’t be! 
Mother, that can’t be?” 

But she was silent. Then Elizabeth came up behind 
him and got into the carriage; there were no good-bys 
between them. 

“I shall come to town to-morrow on the noon train,” 
he told his mother; and she looked at him as one looks at 
468 


THE IRON WOMAN 


another human creature who turns his face toward the 
wilderness. There was nothing more that she could do 
for him; he must hunger and know how he might be 
fed; he must hear the lying whisper that if he broke the 
Law, angelic hands would prevent the law from breaking 
him; he must see the Kingdom he desired, the glory of 
it, and its easy price. He must save himself. 

Elizabeth, groping for Mrs. Richie’s hand, held it 
tightly in hers, and the old carriage began its slow tug 
along the road that wound in and out among the 
dunes. . . . 

The story of David and Elizabeth and Blair pauses 
here. 

Or perhaps one might say it begins here. A decision 
such as was reached in the little house by the sea is not 
only an end, it is also a beginning. In their bleak cer¬ 
tainty that they were parted, David and Elizabeth had 
none of that relief of the dismissal of effort, which marks 
the end of an experience. Effort w'as all before them; 
for the decision not to change conditions did not at the 
moment change character; and it never changed tem¬ 
peraments. Elizabeth was as far from self-control on 
the morning after that decision as she had been in the 
evening that preceded it. There had to be many even¬ 
ings of rebellion, many'mornings of taking up her burden; 
the story of them begins when she knew, without reason¬ 
ing about it, that the hope of escape from them had ceased. 

Because of those gray hours of dawn and shame and 
self-knowledge, love did not end in David, nor did he 
cease to be rational and inarticulate; there had to be 
weeks of silent, vehement refusal to accept the situation. 
something must be done! Elizabeth must get a divorce 
“somehow”! It would take time, a long time, perhaps; 
but she must get it, and then they would marry. There 
had to be weeks of argument: “why should I sacrifice 
my happiness to ‘ preserve the ideal of the permanence of 

469 


THE IRON WOMAN 


marriage’ ?” There had to be weeks of imprisonment in 
himself before a night came when his mother woke to 
find him at her bedside: “Mother—mother—mother,” 
he said. What else he said, how in his agonizing dumb¬ 
ness he was able to tell her that she was the mother, 
not, indeed, of his body, but of his soul—was only for 
her ears; what his face, hidden in her pillow,confessed,the 
quiet darkness held inviolate. This silent man’s experi¬ 
ences of shame and courage, began that night when, in 
the fire-lit room, besieged by darkness and the storm, 
that other experience ended. 

Blair’s opportunity—the divine opportunity of sacri¬ 
fice, had its beginning in that same desolate End. But 
there had to be angry days of refusing to recognize any 
opportunity—life had not trained him to such courageous 
recognition! There had to be days when the magnanim¬ 
ity of his prisoner in returning to her prison was unen¬ 
durable to him. There had to be months, before, goaded 
by his god, he urged his hesitating manhood to abide by 
the decision of chance whether or not he should offer her 
her freedom. There even had to be days of deciding 
just what the chance should be! 

There had to be for these three people, caught in the 
mesh of circumstance, time for growth and for hope, and 
that is why their story pauses just when the angel has 
troubled the water. All the impulses and the resolutions 
that had their beginnings in that End, are like circles 
on that troubled water, spreading, spreading, spreading, 
until they touch Eternity. At first the circles were not 
seen; only the turmoil in the pool when the angel touched 
it. And how dark the water was with the sedir^ent of 
doubt and fear and loss in the days that followed that 
decision which was the beginning of all the circles! 

Robert Ferguson and David’s mother used to wonder 
how they could any cf them get through the next few 
months. “But good is going to come out of it some¬ 
how,” Helena Richie said once. 

470 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Oh, you mean ‘character’ and all that sort of thing,’* 
he said, sighing. “ 1 tell you what it is, Tm a lot more 
concerned about my child’s happiness than her ‘charac^ 
ter.’ Elizabeth is good enough for me as she is.’’ 

David’s mother had no rebuke for him; she looked at 
him with pitying eyes; he was so very unhappy in his 
child’s unhappiness! She herself was doing all she could 
for the “child”; she was in Mercer most of that winter. 
“ No, I won’t hire the house,” she told the persistent land¬ 
lord; “ I can’t afford it; I’m only here for a few days at a 
time. No, you sha'n't lower the rent! Robert, Robert, 
what shall I do to keep you from being so foolish? I 
wouldn’t live there if you gave me the house! I want to 
stay at the hotel and be near Elizabeth.” 

In her frequent visits in those next few months she 
grew very near to Elizabeth; it was a wonderfully tender 
relation, full of humility on both sides. 

“I never knew how good you were, Mrs. Richie,” 
Elizabeth said. 

“I never really understood you, dear child,” Helena 
Richie confessed. She drew near Blair, too; she knew 
how he had borne the story Elizabeth told him when she 
came back to Mercer; she knew the recoil of anger and 
jealousy, then the reaction of cringing acceptance of the 
fact; she knew his passionate efforts, as the winter 
passed, to buy his way into his wife’s friendship by doing 
everything he fancied might please her. She knew why 
he asked Mr. Ferguson to find a place for him in the 
Works, and why he induced Nannie to take the money 
he believed to be his, and build a hospital. “He is 
going to use the old house for it,” Mrs. Richie told Mr. 
Ferguson; “well! it’s one way of getting Nannie out of 
it, though I’m afraid he’ll have to turn the workmen 
in and rebuild over her head before he can move 
her.” 

“ It’s the bait in the trap,” Robert Ferguson said, con¬ 
temptuously. 


471 


THE IRON WOMAN 


“Well, suppose it is? Can you blame him for trying 
to win her?” 

“He’ll never succeed. If he was half-way honest he 
would have offered to let her go in the first place. If he 
expects any story-book business of ‘ duty creating love ’ 
he’ll come out the small end of the horn.” 

“I suppose he hopes,” she admitted. But she sighed. 
She knew those hopes would never be realized, and she 
felt the pain of that poor, selfish, passionate heart until 
her own ached. Yes, of course he ought to ‘offer to let 
her go.’ She knew that as well as Elizabeth’s uncle 
himself. “And he will,” she said to herself. Then her 
face was softly illuminated by the lambent flame of some 
inner serenity: “ But she won’t go!” 

Those were the days when Blair would not recognize 
his opportunity. It was not because it was not pointed 
out to him. 

“I’m certain that a divorce could be fixed up some 
way,” Robert Ferguson said once, “and I hinted as much 
to him. I told him she couldn’t endure the sight of him.” 

“Do you call that a hint?” 

“Well, he didn’t take it, anyway. Of course, if noth¬ 
ing moves him, I suppose I can shoot him?” 

She smiled. “You won’t have to shoot him. He is 
very unhappy. Wait.” 

“ For a change of heart ? It will never come! No, the 
marriage was a travesty from the beginning, and I ought 
to have pulled her out of it. I did suggest it to her, but 
she said she was going to stick it out like a man.” 

Blair was indeed unhappy. His god was tormenting 
him by contrasting Elizabeth’s generosity with his 
selfishness. It was then that he saw, terror-stricken, 
his opportunity. He tried not to see it. He denied it, 
he struggled against it; yet all the while he was drawn 
by an agonized curiosity to consider it. Finally, with 
averted eyes, he held out shrinking hands to chance, to 
see if opportunity would fall into them. This was some 
472 


THE IRON WOMAN 


six months after she had come back to him; six months 
on her part of clinging to Mrs. Richie’s strength; of won¬ 
dering if David, working hard in Philadelphia, was be¬ 
ginning to be happier; of wondering if Blair was really 
any happier for her weariness of soul. Six months on 
Blair’s part, of futile moments of hope because Eliza¬ 
beth seemed a little kinder;—“ perhaps she’s beginning to 
care!” he would say to himself; six months of agonizing 
jealousy when he knew she did not care; of persistent, 
useless endeavors to touch her heart; of endless small, 
pathetic sacrifices; of endless small, pathetic angers and 
repentances. “Blair,” she used to say, with wonderful 
patience, after one of these glimmerings of hope had 
arisen in him because of some careless amiability on her 
part, “I am sorry to be unkind; I wish you would get 
over caring about me, but all I can do ever is just to be 
friends. No, I don’t hate you. Why should I hate 
you? You didn’t wrong me any more than I wronged 
you. We are just the same; two bad people. But I’m 
trying to be good, truly I am; and—and I’m sorry for 
you, Blair, dear. That’s all I can say.” 

It was after one of those miserable discussions between 
the husband and wife that Blair had gone out of the 
hotel with violent words of despair. He never knew 
jtlst where he spent that day—certainly not in the office 
at the Works; but wherever it was, it brought him face 
to face with his opportunity. Should he accept it? 
Should he refuse it? He said to himself that he could 
not decide. Perhaps he was right; he had shirked de¬ 
cisions all his life; perhaps so great a decision was im¬ 
possible for him. At any rate, he thought it was. Some¬ 
thing must decide for him. What should it be? All 
that afternoon he tried to make a small decision which 
should settle the great decision. Of course, he might 
pitch up a penny? no, the swiftness of such judgment 
seemed beyond endurance; he might say: “if it rains 
before noon. I’ll let her go;” then he could watch the 

473 


THE IRON WOMAN 


skies, and meet the decision gradually; no; it rained 
so often in March! If when he got back to the hotel he 
found her wearing this piece of jewelry or that; if the 
grimy pigeon, teetering up and down on the granite 
coping across the street, flew away before he reached the 
next crossing. . . . On and on his mind went, jibing 
away, terrified, from each suggestion; then returning to 
it again. It was dusk when he came back to the hotel. 
David’s mother was sitting with Elizabeth, and they 
were talking, idly, of Nannie’s new house, or Cherry-pie’s 
bad cold, or anything but the one thing that was always 
on their minds, when, abruptly, Blair entered. He 
flung open the door with a bang,—then stood stock¬ 
still on the threshold. He was very pale, but the 
room was so shadowy that his pallor was not no¬ 
ticed. 

“Why are you sitting here in the dark!” he cried out, 
violently. “ Why don’t you light the gas ? Good God!” 
he said, almost with a sob. Elizabeth looked at him in 
astonishment; before she could reply that she and Mrs. 
Richie liked the dusk and the firelight, he saw that she 
was not alone, and burst into a loud laugh: “Mrs. 
Richie here? How appropriate!” He came forward 
into the circle of flickering light, but he seemed to walk 
unsteadily and his face was ghastly. Helena Richie 
gave him a startled look. Blair’s gentleness had never 
failed David’s mother before; she thought, with con¬ 
sternation, that he had been drinking. Perhaps her 
gravity checked his reckless mood, for he said more 
gently: “I beg your pardon; I didn’t see you, Mrs. 
Richie. I was startled because everything was dark. 
Outer darkness! Please don’t go,—it’s so appropriate 
for you to be here!” he ended. Again his voice was 
sardonic. Mrs. Richie said, coldly, that she had been 
just about to return to her own room. As she left them, 
she said to herself, anxiously, that she was afraid there 
was something the matter. She would have been sure 
474 


THE IRON WOMAN 

of it had she stayed in the twilight with the husband 
and wife. 

“Fll light the gas/’ Elizabeth said, rising. But he 
caught her wrist. 

“No! No! there's no use lighting up now.” Ashe 
spoke he pulled her down on his knee. “Elizabeth, is 
there no hope?” he said; “none? ruyiteV* She was 
silent. He leaned his forehead on her shoulder for a 
moment, and she heard that dreadful sound— o. man's 
weeping. Then suddenly, roughly, he flung his arms 
about her, and kissed her violently—her lips, her eyes, 
her neck; the next moment he pushed her from his knee. 
“Why, why did you sit here in the dark to-night? I 
never knew you to sit in the dark!” He got on his feet, 
leaving her, standing amazed and offended, her hair 
ruffled, the lace about her throat in disorder; at the win¬ 
dow, his back turned to her, he flung over his shoulder: 
“ Look here—^you can go. I won't hold you any longer. 
I suppose your uncle can fix it up; some damned legal 
quibble will get you out of it. I—I’ll do my part.” 

Before she could ask him what he meant he went out. 
He had accepted his opportunity! 

But it was not until the next day that she really under¬ 
stood. 

“He says,” Mrs. Richie told Robert Ferguson, “that 
he will take Nannie and go abroad definitely; she can call 
it desertion. Yes; on Nannie’s money of course-; how 
else could he go ? Oh, my poor Blair!” 

“‘Poor Blair’? He deserves all he gets,” Elizabeth's 
uncle said, after his first astonishment. Then, in spite of 
himself, he was sorry for Blair. “ I suppose he’s hard 
hit,” he said, grudgingly, “but as for ‘poor Blair,' I 
don't believe it goes very deep with him. You say he 
was out of temper because she had not lighted up, and 
told her she could go ? Rather a casual way of getting 
rid of a wife.” 

“ Robert, how can you be so unjust?" she reproached 
475 


THE IRON WOMAN 


him. “Oh, perhaps he will be a man yet! How proud 
his mother would be.” 

“My dear Helena, one swallow doesn’t make a sum¬ 
mer.” Then, a little ashamed of his harshness, he added, 
“No, he’ll never be very much of a person; but he’s 
his mother’s son, so he can’t be all bad; he’ll just wander 
round Europe, with Nannie tagging on behind, enjoying 
himself more or less harmlessly.” 

“Robert,” she said, softly, “I’m not sure that Eliza¬ 
beth will accept his sacrifice.” 

“What! Not accept it? Nonsense! Of course she’ll 
accept it. I should have doubts of her sanity if she 
didn’t. If Blair had been half as much of a man as his 
mother, he’d have made the ‘ sacrifice,’ as you call it, long 
ago. Helena, you’re too extreme. Duty is well enough, 
but don’t run it into the ground.” 

Mrs. Richie was silent. 

“Helena, you know she ought to leave him!” 

“If every woman left unpleasant conditions—mind, 
he isn’t unkind or wicked; what would become of us, 
Robert?” 

Elizabeth’s uncle would not pursue her logic; his face 
suddenly softened: “Well, David will come to his own 
at last! I wonder how soon after the thing is fixed up 
(if it can be fixed up) they can marry?” 

The color rose sharply in her face. 

“ You think they won’t ?” he exclaimed. 

“I hope not. Oh, I hope not!” 

“Why not?” he said, affronted. 

“ Because I don’t want them, just for their own happi¬ 
ness, to do what seems to me wrong.” 

“Wrong! If the law permits it, you can’t say ‘wrong.’ ” 

“/ think it is,” she said timidly; then tried to explain 
that it seemed to her that no one, for his own happi¬ 
ness, had a right to do a thing which would injure an 
ideal by which the rest of us live; “I don’t express it very 
well,” she said, flushing. 


476 


THE IRON WOMAN 


Robert Ferguson snorted. “That’s high talk; well 
enough for angels; but no men and mighty few women 
are angels. I,” he interrupted himself hurriedly, “I\ 
don’t like angel women myself.” 

She smiled a little sadly. “And besides that,” she 
said, “it seems to me we ought to take the conse¬ 
quences of our sins. I think they ought, all three 
of them, to just try and make the best of things. 
Robert, did it ever strike you that making the best 
of things was one way of entering the Kingdom of 
Heaven?” 

He gave her a tender look, but he shook his head. 
“Helena,” he said, gently, “do you mind telling me 
how you finally brought them to their senses that 
night? Don’t if you’d rather not.” 

Her face quivered. “ I would rather. There was only 
one way; I . . . told them, Robert.” 

There was a moment of silence, then Robert Ferguson 
twitched his glasses off and began to polish them. “ You 
are an angel, after all,” he said. Then he lifted a ribbon 
falling from her waist, and kissed it. 

“ I sha’n’t try to influence either David or Elizabeth,” 
she said; “they will do what they think right; it may 
not be my right—” 

“ It won’t be,” he told her, dryly; “once a man is free 
to marry his girl, mothers take a back seat.” 

She smiled wisely. 

“Oh, you can smile; but, my dear Helena, the apron¬ 
string won’t do for a man who is thirty years old. Yes, 
they’ll do as they choose, in spite of either you or me— 
and I know what it will be!” 

“ Poor Blair,” she said, sighing. “ Robert, if she leaves 
him 3^ou will be kind to him, won’t you ? He’s never had 
a chance—” 

But he was not thinking of Blair; he was looking 
into her face, and his own face moved with emotion: 
“Helena, don’t be obstinate any longer. We have so 
477 


THE IRON WOMAN 


little time left! I don’t ask you to love me, but just 
marry me, Helena.” 

‘‘Oh, my dear Robert—” 

‘‘Will you?” 

‘‘If I lived here,” she said breathlessly, ‘‘my boy 
could not come to see me.” 

‘‘Is that the reason you won’t say yes?” 

She was silent. 

‘‘Will you?” he said again. 

Her voice was so low he could hardly hear her answer; 
‘‘No.” ) 

And at that his face glowed with sudden, amazed 
assurance. ‘‘Why,” he cried, ''you love meT* 

She looked at him beseechingly. ‘‘ Robert, please—” 

‘‘ Life has been good to me, after all,” he said, joyously 
“I’ve got what I don’t deserve!’* 

Helena was silent. 


THE END 


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